October 30th, 2007 
blogstaff We are introducing guest bloggers to our blog, to make sure you get a variety of information from different sources. It also gives you an opportunity to ask questions to a wide variety of industry people, and more importantly gives you a chance to tell us who you want to hear from. If you have any ideas of interesting people involved with phones that you would like to see write on our blog, let us know. To start us off, I’m pleased to introduce Lee Williams from troubleshooter aficionados Geek Squad:
I’m Lee and have been with the Geek Squad since February 2007. I work as a double agent mostly visiting homes to kill all your spyware, and make computers do what you want them too. My specialties lie in Macs and Mobile Phones so as my first blog post I have given you a quick run through some of the steps you can go through if your phone misbehaves. Hopefully it will be a help to some of you!
Its amazing how many people have problems with phones and do not know basic steps to follow on how to fix them, especially when you consider how importantly mobile phones feature in people’s lives. What I am going to tell you about now are the steps I go through to fix a problem:
1. Turn the phone on and off
It may sound obvious but whenever I get someone who cannot make a call, cannot text or even some keys do not work the first thing I ask them is, have you tried turning your phone on and off. We refer to it as a power cycle and it can fix a lot of problems, a customer will often ask me why should they have to do that. You must bear in mind that most mobiles are on 24/7 there are not many electrical devices that have the same demands put upon them. By performing a power cycle you are giving the phone a breather.
2. If the problem still exists try a master reset
This is like a super power cycle if you will, a phone may look pretty basic from the menu you see but there are thousands of processes running in the background that determine how your phone run. So if one of those processes is not working correctly it is very difficult to diagnose and also even more difficult to change. The best thing to do is a factory reset, it is often found in settings and should be relatively easy to find. It will change your ringtone and wallpaper and any other customization your have made but will not delete your pictures or any other data, (be careful with Sony Ericsson handsets though there is an option which does do this, just pay particular attention to what it says on the screen).
3. Still Broken
If these are both unsuccessful you should check your phone for water damage, there is usually an indicator on your battery which should be a white dot or small square, if it is any other colour then I am afraid you are in trouble. Water damage does not always manifest itself immediately so that time you thought you got away with using it in the rain 3 months ago could easily only now just be affecting your phone, if this is the case your phone insurance should cover you for a replacement.
Other than that the phone could simply have a bug, the phone manufacturers are under such pressure to release new handsets the quickest, the testing time before release is getting shorter and shorter this is why they entitle you to free software upgrades throughout your entire first year of ownership so you can make sure you have the fastest most feature packed experience possible with your handset. This is done by either sending your phone to the manufacturer (usually 28 days) or the easier option is to take it to a Carphone Warehouse where on occasion they can fix it on site if they can, failing that they send it to a central location where the turnaround time is around 14 days.
4. If all else fails….
Try finding people with the same problem. If your problem is on a Nokia n95 and you are having trouble sending texts type “nokia n95 text problem forum” into the Google and you will be granted access to a world where people are having the same problem where most of the time someone else has done the hard work and found a solution already that you can apply. If this is fruitless you can always appeal for help by crating your own topic, the Nokia forum is especially helpful with the engineers themselves often posting solutions.
So these are the steps that I follow myself and also when I am charged with the task of fixing other phones too. Hopefully if you follow them to it will help you out. Always remember to back up your photos and numbers either on a computer or extra memory card. If this all sounds a bit confusing and not worth your time, you can get us to do it instead. Call 0800 049 4335 and a geek squad agent will be on hand to advise you of the best solution. If you would rather e-mail send your problem to contact@geeksquad.co.uk and chances are I will deal with you myself.
Lee Williams | Agent 5235
Geek Squad Europe | London
Posted in 
Good advice. It is amazing how much people expect from a mobile phone. There’s so much more to go wrong with phones these days too. A device that’s essentially a hard disk with a screen, performing the task of a DIGITAL camera, a DIGITAL music player, diary, game station as well as communications device, people don’t seem to realise what they have.
How are they going to get onto google to search for help when they get rid of their desktops and use their mobile for internet access though?
Excellent advice. Your blog’s informative is very rich in contents. I like your way of
presentation. At times I disagree with your views but thinking about it who
presents views that are acceptable to everyone
Thanks for the comments, feel free to make any suggestions of who you would like to see writing on the blog! Hannah
Good information look forward to the next instalment
Site really resource
thanks mateys.phone now working after steps one and two. also, not gonna use phone in rain again!
where would we be without geeks?
Thanks for the information. Good write up
——————————————————————————–
My sister’s mobile phone suddenly stopped working today.
She can send & receive texts ok but when she tries to ring someone all she can hear is two rings & then her phone stops. I dialled her number & all I got was two rings & then it stopped. The mobile is only about 5 months old & she removed the battery & reinserted it but to no avail.
Anyone with any ideas?
Model Number Nokia 3220
I am useing internet by opera mini. But i can’t download or save any document from free site.My phone model is LGKE970.when i want to save on my memory card that time a mesage box shows not permited.Please give soluation.,
Declan,
Try going into the settings, then phone settings then reset to factory defaults, the code will be 12345 unless she has changed it.
If this does not work, verify the fault and check that the phone is actually the problem by trying her sim in another phone to see if the problem occurs still.
Failing these two options, as the phone is only 5 months old it will still be under warranty so you can get it repaired for free, either through nokia or your local carphone warehouse.
hi there
i have a nokia phone as does my friend – i can receive texts from her but she cannot receive them from me even when i return on her messages – i think she has some kind of a block on me, but she not sure if she has done anything – please can you help?
thanks dawn
Hi, I think I am having a similar problem to dawn on the previous post. For about 3yrs now, I have had txting and calling problems. I txt alot to the channel islands and nine times out of ten the txts dont get to my friend and her’s dont get to me,then out of the blue after trying for ages one will appear and then it goes back to not working again.This can go on for several days without receiving a single txt,they leave my phone but i dont know where they end up and the same for my friend. I have asked nokia about this and o2 as well as sure mobile in the Channel islands but they just keep saying it must be the other end. I have had a new sim card and we have each had new phones but nothing makes a difference, its very frustrating and a waste of money when we are actually charged for the calls and txts that just dont work. Could some please help, thanks…Louise
Dawn and Louise, it may have something to do with how the number is stored in the phonebook, try typing the number instead of selecting it from the phonebook using the 07 prefix and the +447 prefix. If you can find one of these works you can delete their phonebook entry and add it again using whichever number worked the manual way.
I have seen this problem a few times and not found a solution, changing your phone number usually will work if it comes to that but I appreciate this is not always ideal.
How can i add new words to the dictionary on my samsung tocco ultra? please help!!
I’ve been having a problem with my phone, had it about 10 months now. I’m not sure if thus is related but I recieved a call yesterday morning from a number noot recognised by my phone book. Later on i went to look through my calls and i noticed that the number now had a name, it was like a foreign version of the letter ‘e’.
Anyway i went to check through my phone book to see if it was in there and it wouldnt let me access the phonebook, there was a slight pause where i thought the phone was going to crash and then the cursor became operational again. I tried accessing other things from the menu screen and it worked fine, so i tried the contacts again and it just froze up completely.
Since then i have tried to restart the phone several times, the only way that i had any joy what so ever was by plugging it in first and then turning the handset on. When i did this i got to the main screen where my wallpaper was, but the options were greyed out so i couldnt do anything. A few seconds followed and then i got a dark blue screen, the phone had crashed again.
Have you any idea how to solve this problem as i cant get on it to do a factory reset and also any idea as to what may have caused it. I’m concerned that my phone may have a virus although i know that these are almost unheard of.
Another thing to note is that i seemed to be recieving a really poor signal on the phone where as normally i would have a very strong one and very consistently :S
I hope you can help me, thanks for your time.
oh and my phone is a sony ericsson c510.
My phone has been left on silent. Now I cannot find it! Is there any way to have the phone re-activated so that it can tell me where it is?
Hey, have a nokia, slider ( not sure which model, approx 2 years old)
Problem, when partner send texts screen goes white and no message comes through,
This happened a few months ago but it righted itself, only happening with his phone, texts coming in from others with no problems
I am on O2 he on 3, he has since changed his phone but problem persists.
Hope you can help
Hey, after having my HTC Desire HD for 10 months now, i have been patiently putting up with the poor battery. And after delibverating for sometime i have come to the decision to sell the phone, and buy a new one. The new phone, will be a blackberry. And all i was wondering was that if i purchase this phone, will i be able to transfer my current contract on to a blackberry contract, so that i can make the most of the new phone…
Cheers, Will.