I Hard Reset My Galaxy Phone And I’m So Glad I Did

I’ve had my Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra for five years now, and surprisingly, I’ve never reset it. Before this, I had at least three Galaxy phones and would reset them once a year, mainly to clear out all the garbage that accumulates over time. In fact, we bought my wife a new Galaxy A50 phone last year to replace my old Galaxy Note 8, which I then hard reset and immediately noticed a dramatic improvement in battery life. As an aside, I was going to sell the Note 8 but decided to keep it as a backup.

How To Hard Reset A Samsung Galaxy Phone

Nowadays, in order to hard reset, you need to connect your phone to a PC through a USB cable, which apparently makes it more difficult to reset stolen phones, but I don’t buy that. Anyway, I wrote about this in How To Hard Reset Your Android Phone With USB Cable, but that was simply to clear the cache. The procedure is the same – with the phone switched off, hold the power and volume up keys until the phone restarts and you see the bootloader screen. You then use the volume up/down keys to select your required option, which in my case was wipe data/factory reset. This cannot be undone because it removes all your apps and data, so you must ensure that you’ve taken the necessary backups. When it restarts, it’s like you’ve just acquired a brand new phone, so clearly you need to go through the usual procedures to set everything up, including the numerous Google and Microsoft security checks. I decided to start from scratch and NOT accept reinstalling a backup of my apps because I knew that I had far too many that I never used.

A hard reset is more aggressive than a soft reset, so be sure to choose the right option for your needs. Another factor was the amount of images and other crap that accumulated over the years, much of which were memes that circulate over WhatsApp that you look at once but never again. Or selfies that people send you that you don’t care about, and photos of other people that you’ve never met. Being rid of all that crap is a relief. I mean, how many Trump memes can you tolerate? In my case, it’s zero.

No More Doom Scrolling!

I also decided NOT to install any social media. That includes Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Tumblr, and a few more. The reason being that I had found myself doom scrolling (not the depressing type!) social media with my morning cup of tea and an hour later forgetting what I’d seen, cat videos being an exception. One could call that brain rot, and I tend to agree, so my morning routine is now to read the headlines, check the weather forecast, and either read a book or carry on writing on my laptop. I’ve also noticed that my phone is now more responsive with a definite improvement in battery life.

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