Why! we should have to write own blog ?

Today, everyone is using tech devises computers, smart phone etc with Internet. everyone knows how to use Internet in their daily life. in World, there are people with great abilities which are now no more hidden from outside world if you share with other people.

Many blogger puts their thoughts on their blog so others can read them, take guidance from them, can use in their life. It can be anything, you can just write about your hobbies, life experiences, study, learnings, nature adventure, guidance etc. some of them share educational tips with others where we can take free advantage and can implement our life.

on Internet world, many of them are writing about technical news, tech gadgets, computers tips and tricks, Internet tips and other tech resources which are very helpful to us.

undocopy is tech blog one of them which are provide wide knowledge about Internet tips, blogging, nature love, education, softwares, etc. you can check that too.

on your own blog site you can also share you all kind of your own views with other. you can write anything out there without any cost.

Below list of best free blogging platforms 

Blogger (www.undocopy.com using this service)

You'd hope with a name like 'Blogger' that Blogger would be a decent free service for blogging. Fortunately, it is. Sign in with your Google ID, and you can have a blog up and running in seconds, which can then be customized with new themes. It is, however, a Google service, and so be a touch wary, given how abruptly that company sometimes shuts things down that millions of people were happily using.

Tumblr

To some extent, Tumblr feels a bit like a half-way house between WordPress and Twitter. It offers more scope than the latter, but tends to favour rather more succinct output than the former.

Decent mobile apps make it easy to submit content to a Tumblr blog from anywhere, though, and it's reasonably easy to customize your theme to make it your own.

Tumblr also has a strong social undercurrent, via a following model combined with notes and favourites. Although be mindful that the service has quite a few porn bots lumbering about, which may give the faint-of-heart a bit of a shock should they check every favourite off of their posts.

WordPress

WordPress is responsible for 76.5 million blogs and counting! The reason why it’s so popular has to do with its flexibility and unique features, such as the ability to customize your permalinks. The tools at your disposal here are ideal for beginners, but there’s enough depth and freedom for veterans to stretch their legs as well.

On top of this, WordPress has themes and plugins. These two features allow you to easily customize the look and feel of your site. Themes will give you structured layouts and plugins will add functionality like SEO tracking, analytics, social media share buttons, and plenty more.

WordPress is constantly improving and being updated as well. Its open-source design allows anyone to tweak the program and add new functionality as they see fit.

What Types of Blogs Should Use WordPress?

    Personal blogs

    Online portfolios

    eCommerce sites

    Just about any type of site, really

Weebly

With Weebly we’re crossing into the world of website builders. These are perfect for beginners who don’t have any web design experience.  Web builders allow you to easily drag-and-drop new elements into your theme.

It takes the complications out of web design and does all the coding in the background so you can focus on the end result. There’s a free account option that lets you dive in and check out the various tools and features on offer.

You’ll be able to create extremely professional looking websites that are also mobile-responsive for maximum rankings on Google and other search engines.

Medium

For those who simply want to see their thoughts and ideas take root on the internet, Medium is a great way to get it done. You can join a community of people who are from all walks of life.

For the sheer “feel” of blogging, you can’t beat the simplicity that Medium offers. This is a place where you can have your voice heard without the responsibility of a full-time blogger.

The fact that it’s also a free and open platform means that you can jump in quickly, write about anything that you’re passionate about, and share it with the world.

You’ll also be able to read other people’s work which will in turn inspire new content for you. It’s a beautiful way to get in touch with the spirit of blogging.

Who is Medium For?

People with strong opinions or unique perspectives

Someone who simply wants to feel what it’s like to blog

A curious blog reader who wants to try their hand at the craft

Wix

Wix promises to give you an incredible looking website without requiring any knowledge of coding whatsoever. This is another website builder, but you really can’t argue with the results people get.

Professional results, without the need for advanced web design knowledge, is a massive benefit of using Wix. Businesses will also find a lot to love here. The company offers plenty of tools and designs to assist growing businesses.

The designs on offer all exhibit a strong understanding of today’s styles and best practices. It’s a very well maintained blogging platform. The company is continuously growing and the user base is a loyal bunch.

Overall, Wix ranks in the top among other website builders. If you need great results with simple and easy to use tools, this is a great pick.

What Types of Bloggers Should Use Wix?

    eCommerce websites are a great fit here.

    Small businesses

    Artists and writers

    Beginners

Squarespace

Squarespace wants to help you create a website that looks like you spent a ton of money on it. The end results with this platform are extremely polished, responsive, and visually pleasing websites.

Squarespace is a great option for websites that have a lot of dependence on their layout and design. The options here will give you the ability to make a website with image-focused design and a very clean look.

This platform is a website builder like some of the others on this list. As a result of that, you can easily make tweaks to the design without ever touching a line of code. That level of convenience is spectacular.

Digging deeper into this platform, there’s a feature called Cover Pages that lets you create scrolling layouts that can be combined with a template or made on its own. This adds a flourish to your website that would normally require an intense amount of coding.

Each and every template you use on Squarespace is also responsive, meaning it will appear properly on desktops and mobile devices. This may not seem huge, but it has a gigantic impact on your success in both search rankings and with customers.

What makes this platform stand out from other website builders is the thoughtfulness put into the design options. What I mean by that, is the fact that everything is laid out in a simple and user-friendly way.

Everything from colors, to font, to spacing and sidebar width can be tweaked at the touch of a button.

Who Should Use Squarespace? 

    Business owners

    Bloggers who want a very flashy web design

    Beginner’s looking for a user-friendly website builder

Penzu

Penzu is focused on the original purpose of blogs as online journals. This platform takes that approach as its main focus with great results. You can sign up for free and choose from different types of journals.

Some of them are public, others are private. You can tweak the settings in any way you like and let your thoughts take form on the page. If you’re trying to form a schedule, there’s another great feature here that lets you receive email reminders when you’re supposed to post.

By default, the journal entries you have are private, but you can choose to make public. You’ll have options for your cover, background, and font to make the journal unique to you and your personality.

Who Should Use Penzu 

    Someone who wants to have a blog for journaling purposes.

    A beginner looking to try out blogging.

    Someone who loves journaling, but wants to go digital.

SVBTLE

SVBTLE immediately captures your attention when you arrive by saying that it was designed to work like the human brain. It’s a platform that not only gives you the ability to blog, but also the inspiration you need to come up with new ideas.

It all starts with a dashboard designed to help you curate ideas and guide you through the process of seeing them come into fruition. Unlike many free blog sites, SVBTLE also promises that they will never take down your blog.

The design of the text editor is geared towards a distraction-free experience that allows you to focus while you work. Finally, the final product is clean and easy to read for your visitors.

It’s slick, simple, and suave. A great platform for bloggers and a great way for writers to grow and develop their ideas.

Who Should Try SVBTLE? 

    Writers who want a free-flowing platform

    Bloggers who struggle with writer’s block

    People who need a distraction-free experience

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What is an SD card and How do SD cards works?

SD memory cards work by recording data onto a solid-state chip inside the card using flash memory. The flash memory records information when electrical charges change in its circuits. A similar process erases portions of the memory for rewriting.

For mobile phones and tablets, the type of memory card you'll need is a microSD. Cards of this type are barely bigger than your fingernail, but can store enormous amounts of data.

Inside every SD card, rows of tiny memory chips are at work storing all your documents, music, photos and more. And because there are no moving parts, it's all done quickly and effortlessly.

This lack of moving parts also means that microSD cards can be pretty durable: many of the current products on the market even claim to be waterproof.

Samsung, for example, claims that its microSD cards are safe from all kinds of water damage. The company also claims that the cards can survive being run over by a 1.6 tonne vehicle, or withstand the magnetic forces exerted by a an MRI scanner.

How does an SD card work?

As soon as a memory card is plugged into your phone, it gets straight to work. In most cases, your phone will automatically begin to scan the card, pull all the information it needs straight away and file it in the proper place for you.

Android phones, for example, will look for any pictures you have stored on the card – no matter what format they're in – and add them to your gallery. If you want to increase your phone's memory or invest in small, secure backup storage, a microSD card should be ideal.

However, you do need to be careful when removing your memory card, and ideally you'll only have to remove it when changing phones. When your phone is actively accessing the memory card, everything on it is a little more vulnerable than usual. If the connection is broken, you can end up with only half the file it wanted to transfer – and more often than not, the card won't know how to deal with it.

This can lead to your pictures not opening correctly, some of your applications crashing or even just a really sluggish phone. Preferably, you should only remove your memory card only when the phone is switched off completely – but at a stretch, many phones have an 'unmount SD card' option in their settings somewhere, so you can switch them when needed.

As time goes on, cards with more and more capacity are coming out – and with mobile cameras increasing in megapixel size and apps and games getting bigger all the time, you really need all the storage you can get.

you can easily pick up microSD cards that are up 128GB in size – and some specialist cards are even bigger. 

SD is an abbreviation for "secure digital." The data on an SD card is stored in a digital format. The solid-state chip inside the card's plastic cover contains many tiny electrical circuits. When the card is not in use, the circuits retain their charges without any additional power. When a card is placed in an activated device, such as a camera or a cellphone, a small electrical current from the device moves electrons in the flash memory chip. 

The digital patterns stored on the chip correlate to the data stored there. Data is erased when a slightly higher voltage is applied to the circuit. This allows for rewriting. SD cards write and erase memory in blocks or sections. This makes them faster than some other varieties of data storage.

SD cards meet legal requirements for storing content with copyright protection. Copyright protected works, such as songs and books, are written with a media identifier code. That code is placed on a protected portion of the solid-state memory. The copyright protected work cannot be copied without access to that media identifier code. This keeps data from being copied multiple times and widely circulated without permission.

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Free Online Tools for Looking up Potentially Malicious Websites

Many Website's offer free on-line tools for looking up a potentially malicious website. Some of these tools provide historical information; others examine the URL in real time to identify threats.

This is very useful for your website to make trustful and secure website to your visitor. when you apply from any website to review your website for malicious test and after verification you can also add their review html tags to your website which are very beneficial for your website rating in Google and other search engine.

Below are some website's where you can check and rate your website.

Trustpilot:Trustpilot is committed to ensuring better on line shopping experiences for everyone, which means we work hard to fight fabricated reviews. No company can delete or otherwise censor reviews.

AVG Website Safety Reports: Provides historical reputation data about the site.

BrightCloud URL/IP Lookup: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

Comodo Web Inspector: Examines the URL in real-time.

Cisco SenderBase: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

Cymon: Presents data from various threat intel feeds.

Deepviz: Offers historical threat intel data about IPs, domains, etc.
FortiGuard lookup: Displays the URL’s history and category.

IBM X-Force Exchange: Provides historical data about IPs, URLs, etc.

Joe Sandbox URL Analyzer: Examines the URL in real time.

Is It Hacked: Performs several of its own checks of the URL in real time and consults some blacklists.

IsItPhishing: Assesses the specified URL in real-time.

KnownSec: Presents historical reputation data about the website; Chinese language only.

Norton Safe Web: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

PhishTank: Looks up the URL in its database of known phishing websites.

Malware Domain List: Looks up recently-reported malicious websites.

MalwareURL: Looks up the URL in its historical list of malicious websites.

McAfee Site Advisor: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

McAfee TrustedSource: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

MxToolbox: Queries multiple reputational sources for information about the IP or domain.

Open Threat Exchange: Presents diverse threat intelligence data from AlienVault.

PassiveTotal: Presents passive DNS and other threat intelligence data.

Quttera ThreatSign: Scans the specified URL for the presence of malware.

Reputation Authority: Shows reputational data on specified domain or IP address.

Sucuri SiteCheck: Scans the URL for malware in real time and looks it up in several blacklists.

Trend Micro Web Reputation: Presents historical reputation data about the website.

Unmask Parasites: Looks up the URL in the Google Safe Browsing database.

URL Blacklist: Looks up the URL in its database of suspicious sites.

URL Query: Looks up the URL in its database of suspicious sites and examines the site’s content.

URLVoid and IPVoid: Looks up the URL or IP in several blacklisting services.

VirusTotal: Looks up the URL in several databases of malicious sites.

vURL: Retrieves and displays the source code of the page; looks up its status in several blocklists.

ThreatMiner: Presents diverse threat intelligence data.

WebPulse Site Review: Looks up the website in BlueCoat’s database.

Zscaler Zulu URL Risk Analyzer: Examines the URL using real-time and historical techniques.

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What is the Difference Between Impact Printers and Non-Impact Printers?

Printer Technology has advanced greatly over the past few decades. Yesterday's impact printers were noisy devices that either churned out blocky documents mixing text and graphics or generated attractive text, but without the ability to print graphics, varying fonts or even varied text sizes. Many of today's non-impact printers are almost whisper quiet and generate entire pages in just a few seconds. However, impact printer technology still has its benefits.

Impact Printers

Impact printers operate by having an element strike the paper. An impact printer forms characters and graphics on a piece of paper by striking a mechanism against an inked ribbon that physically contacts the paper. Impact printers are ideal for printing multipart forms because they easily print through many layers of paper. Two commonly used types of impact printers are dot-matrix printers and line printers.

A dot-matrix printer produces printed images when tiny wire pins on a print head mechanism strike an inked ribbon. When the ribbon presses against the paper, it creates dots that form characters and graphics. Dot-matrix printers typically use continuousform paper, in which thousands of sheets of paper are connected together end to end. The pages have holes along the sides to help feed the paper through the printer. The speed of most dot-matrix printers ranges from 375 to 1100 characters per second (cps), depending on the desired print quality.

A line printer is a high-speed impact printer that prints an entire line at a time. The speed of a line printer is measured by the number of lines per minute (lpm) it can print. Some line printers print as many as 3,000 lpm.

 For instance, to make a capital "I" in a serif font, the top and bottom pin would fire, then every pin would fire, then the top and bottom pin would fire. The pins strike an ink-impregnated ribbon and press it into the paper, leaving a mark. One of the problems with dot matrix printing technology is that there are gaps between the pins, leading to output that has a number of gaps and looks incomplete. 

Daisy wheel impact printers pressed a wheel with pre-formed characters, much like the mechanism in an electrical typewriter, against a ribbon to form an impression on a page. They produced very high quality output but could only print in a single font and character size. In addition, they were extremely slow, with some printing just 10 characters per second.

Non-Impact Printers

The printheads of non-impact printers do not strike the page. In an inkjet printer, a printhead sits a small distance above the page and either sprays ink or pops a bubble of ink onto the paper. Laser and light-emitting diode printers use electrical charges to transfer dry toner particles from a light sensitive drum to a piece of paper and then melt the toner onto it.

Benefits of Impact Printers

Impact printers have a couple of benefits. The first is that since they use pressure to generate an image, they work with multipart forms that either have leaves of carbon paper or use carbon-imprinted paper. The second is that since they print one line at a time instead of one page at a time, their paper feed mechanisms are designed to let them use continuous forms.

Non-Impact Printer

A nonimpact printer forms characters and graphics on a piece of paper without actually striking the paper. Some nonimpact printers spray ink, while others use heat or pressure to create images. Commonly used nonimpact printers are ink-jet printers, photo printers, laser printers, thermal printers, mobile printers, plotters, and large-format printers.

An ink-jet printer is a type of nonimpact printer that forms characters and graphics by spraying tiny drops of liquid ink onto a piece of paper. Ink-jet printers have become a popular type of color printer for use in the home. Ink-jet printers produce text and graphics in both black-and-white and color on a variety of paper types.

A photo printer is a color printer that produces photo-lab-quality pictures. Some photo printers print just one or two sizes of photos, for example, 3 3 5 inches and 4 3 6 inches. Others print up to letter size, legal size, or even larger. Many photo printers use ink-jet technology. With models that can print lettersized documents, users connect the photo printer to their computer and use it for all their printing needs.

A laser printer is a high-speed, high-quality nonimpact printer.Laser printers for personal computers ordinarily use individual sheets of paper stored in one or more removable trays that slide in the printer case.

Non-impact printers have advanced to a point that they are better than impact printers at just about everything other than feeding continuous paper and working with multi-part forms. They have much higher resolutions since, instead of using metal pins, they can use drops of ink measured in picoliters or toner particles measured in micrometers. Non-impact printers are also much quieter, making it possible for them to be used out in the open in office settings.

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Things you Should know about Antarctica

All of the continents are known for something. Asia is the largest and most densely populated. Africa is home to the most countries in the world as well as the Nile, the world’s largest river. South America contains the Ecuadorian Mount Chimborazo, the highest point on Earth. Not only is Australia literally a country unto itself, but it is also Earth’s largest island. Europe is home to the world’s smallest country – Vatican City. North America contains every climate and is home to the world’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Superior. 

But wait – what about little old Antarctica, that cold place on the bottom of the globe? What is there to know about frigid barren land made of ice? The truth is that there are plenty of fantastic and interesting things to know about the loneliest and coldest continent on Earth, and here are just a few fun facts to get you started.

On the southernmost part of Earth lies one huge and mysterious landmass – the frozen continent of Antarctica.

With an area covering about 5.4 million square miles, Antarctica is the fifth largest continent on the planet. It is located entirely within the Arctic Circle, which means the temperatures here are persistently below zero throughout the year. But, despite its incredibly harsh weather conditions, the place is frequently visited by many scientists and explorers. For these reasons, it has been named one of the most interesting places in the world.

Here are some other things you have to know about this frozen continent:

1. Antarctica is the largest desert in the world.

2. Antarctica is the only continent without reptiles.

3. The coldest place on Earth is a high ridge in Antarctica where temperatures can dip below -133°F (-93.2°C).

4. Some parts of Antarctica have had no rain or snow for the last 2 million years.

5. There is a waterfall in Antarctica that runs red.

6. Antarctica has only one ATM.

7. 90% of the world’s fresh water is in Antarctica.

8. You cannot work in Antarctica unless you have had your wisdom teeth and appendix removed.

9. There are no polar bears in Antarctica (only in the Arctic), but there are lots penguins.

10. Antarctica is the only continent without a time zone.

11. Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, highest, and driest continent on Earth.

12. Ice melting in Antarctica has caused a small shift in gravity in the region.

13. Chile has a civilian town in Antarctica, complete with a school, hospital, hostel, post office, Internet, TV and mobile phone coverage.

14. The ice sheet of Antarctica has been in existence for at least 40 million years.

15. There are 300 lakes beneath Antarctica that are kept from freezing by the warmth of Earth’s core.

16. The highest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica is 58.2°F (14.5°C).

17. Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth is in Antarctica. It spews crystals.

18. Antarctica was once as warm as modern-day California.

19. There are at least seven Christian churches in Antarctica.

20. A scientist in Antarctica got a date through Tinder with a girl camping just 45 minutes away.

21. Most of Antarctica is covered in ice: less than 1% is permanently ice-free.

22. The largest iceberg ever measured is bigger than Jamaica: 11,000 sq km (4,200 sq mi). It broke away from Antarctica in 2000.

23. The average thickness of ice in Antarctica is about 1 mile (1.6 km).

24. In 1977, Argentina sent a pregnant mother to Antarctica in an effort to claim a portion of the continent. The boy became the first human known to be born in Antarctica.

25. Winds in some places of Antarctica can reach 200 mph (320 km/h).

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Do's and don'ts for every Android user

There are a lot of choices when it comes to making your Android phone all it can be, and a lot of nuance about which are the “best” choices to make. Everyone has an opinion about the best apps, home screen layouts, launchers, and so on. However, there are some enduring certainties that cannot be avoided. Here are “do’s” and “don’ts” for every Android user.

Do: Configure data usage limits

Don’t go over your monthly allotment again.

Every Android phone has a tool in the main system settings to monitor and limit your data usage. In this age of limited data plans, you should probably take a moment to set that up as soon as possible. You can set your monthly billing cycle date, data limit, and configure a warning when you’re near your limit. There’s even a setting to disable data so you don’t end up with overages, if that’s something your carrier does.

Don’t: Use third-party lock screens

The stock lock screen is always more secure and stable than its replacements.

Many parts of your phone can be customized extensively, and you can even replace things you don’t like. There’s one component that you ought to leave alone—the lock screen. The Play Store offers a heap of replacement lock screen apps, but there’s no official method for replacing the Android lock screen. 

That means all those apps are just messy hacks that require you sacrifice security. The method they use to take over the screen when you wake the phone is also likely to cause lag. When it comes to the lock screen, you should just make do with the limited customization options included with your phone.

Do: Set up and Use ‘OK Google’

DO: Delete all unnecessary apps, media, and content

Smartphones are just like any other computer. While flash drives don’t work like today’s typical hard drives, they still do slow down when you have more data on them. The easiest way to improve smartphone performance for your Android device is to get rid of all unnecessary material. Not only will doing so speed up the phone itself, but it’ll also speed up your workflow. Instead of having 50 to 60 apps to sort through, just keeping the bare essentials and getting rid of everything else will speed up your usage.

DON’T: Update to brand new versions of Android

While we all want the latest and greatest software and features, they typically slow down devices. This issue isn’t exclusive to smartphones; the recently released OS X Yosemite beta brought a noticeable lag to some MacBooks in addition to the new features.

With Android, you may not even be given the option of whether you want to update software to a new version or not. But if and when you do, take heed: making a significant upgrade will always slow down the phone. The bigger the software update, the slower the phone is likely to become. Wait and see if anyone else who has same phone and has completed the update runs into issues before jumping on board yourself.

DO: Close any apps that you use infrequently, and use lighter apps for the services you need

Android has a number of strengths over iOS and other mobile platforms. One of the best is multitasking, Android can run a variety of applications at once. On older Android phones that may not be a good thing, because as the software improves and becomes more hardware-intensive, your phone remains the same. If you notice things are slower, close whatever you aren’t using.

On that point, there are plenty of different apps that can be used for the same purpose. You may have one web browser built in, plus Chrome, Opera, and Dolphin; multiple chat apps; multiple phone apps; picture apps; Twitter apps; etc. As mentioned above, there’s no reason to have multiple versions of the same app. 

When you decide what to keep and what to drop, remember that some apps are slower than others, and keep the one that best suits your needs along with the speed you require. For example, stick with the stock Twitter app versus Carbon, or Opera instead of Chrome.

DON’T: Run applications off of an external memory card

Android’s expandable memory is a useful feature for many users, but those memory cards are always going to be slower than the phone’s built-in flash drive. If you have a memory card, use it for music, video, and other media. Running apps from an external memory card is just fine, but it will work slower because your phone has to take more time to move it from the external card to internal RAM, and when you close the app, your phone will have to do the process in reverse, too. So run apps straight from the phone, and leave media on the external media card.

DO: Close all applications and reboot the phone once a week

Must Read: Phone slow? quick fixes to make your Android phone fast again

Even on brand new smartphones, eventual slowdown is bound to happen. Mobile operating systems aren’t mature enough to handle data and memory management as well as, say, Windows 7. So even if you’re diligent about closing apps, managing your phone properly, never pushing it too hard, or anything else, eventually it’ll need a fresh reset to clear out the cobwebs.

With older phones, you’ll need to do reboots more often. Make sure to close all apps first, because all of that app data is saved prior to shutting off. Closing apps before turning off the phone will improve smartphone performance because it forces the phone to save information immediately, so when you reboot, the device will be fresh and not cluttered with all of those apps starting up from their last place.

Instant voice search from anywhere!

The “OK Google” hotword is the quickest way to start a voice search on Android, and it’s something you should take advantage of. The options available to you vary a bit from one device to the next, but you should at least be able to speak “OK Google” when the device is awake to open a voice search (called OK Google Everywhere). 

To enable this feature, go to the Google app and open your voice settings to train it with your voice. Some devices (like the Nexus 6) even have the ability to listen for OK Google while the screen is off.

Don’t: Install APKs from untrusted sources

Be careful what you sideload!

One of the cool things about Android is that you can get apps from a variety of sources outside of Google Play, like Amazon and the open source F-Droid repository. However, with great power comes great responsibility.

Don’t go around installing any APK you find posted on a forum, and definitely don’t try to load pirated apps and games on your phone. That’s a great way to end up with malware and spam. You can leave the Unknown sources toggle off in the security settings if you don’t plan to sideload any apps outside of Google Play.

Do: Disable unwanted apps

Get out of here with that junk.

Virtually every phone and tablet comes with at least a few built-in apps you don’t want or need. Even if you never use them, they’ll still sit there in your app drawer, and some will even start up in the background. Often, you won't be able to delete the app if you don't want it. This is particularly common with carrier account management apps.

If you don’t want them, just disable them. You won’t need to root or do anything fancy, just open your system settings and find the app manager (the location within Settings varies by device, unfortunately). Scroll through the list and tap on the offending apps to open the info page. There you’ll see the disable button. Easy.

Don’t: Kill background tasks

This will do more harm than good.

Despite what you’ve heard, Android manages its background tasks just fine. You don’t need a task manager app or anything that claims to speed up your phone by clearing RAM. When a process isn’t needed, Android is smart enough to end it. In fact, micromanaging tasks will cause the phone to slow down because most of the processes these apps kill are simply going to start up again and draw more power in the process.

Do: Set a secure lock screen and use Smart Lock

Security and convenience? Sign me up!

One of Android’s best features is Smart Lock (Android 5.0 and higher only), and it means there’s no excuse whatsoever to put off using a secure lock screen. You can set a pattern or PIN lock screen to keep out unauthorized snoops, then use smart lock to automatically go back to the faster swipe unlock when certain conditions are met. For example, keep the swipe screen active when you’re at home, but if you’re out, the secure lock screen takes over. You can also use trusted Bluetooth devices or even your face to keep the phone unlocked when it’s convenient.

Don’t: Use third-party antivirus apps

This is just redundant.

The internet can be a scary place, and the often sensationalist coverage of Android security issues doesn’t really help. Many phones even come with antivirus apps pre-installed. Frankly, you don’t need them. They’ll just sit in the background and waste processor cycles to scan all the apps you install, even though Google is already scanning them automatically via Play Services. Your phone is better off without a third-party antivirus app.

Do: Plan ahead with Device Manager

Google includes lost phone features as part of all Android devices with Device Manager, which you can access from any computer or phone on the Device Manager website. If you ever lose track of your phone, this tool can track it, make it ring, lock it down, and even remotely delete everything if you don’t think it’s ever coming home. Just make sure you’ve got full administrator access enabled for Device Manager in the settings. Go to Security and find the Phone administrators menu. Make sure Device Manager is checked, and you’re good to go.

Don’t: Reset your phone right after changing your Google password

Device protection is disabled by the OEM unlock toggle.

Google added the device protection system in Android 5.1 to make a stolen phone useless to thieves. Android now asks for the login info from the last Google account used on a device after a reset when Device Protection is enabled. A fair number of devices already support it, and almost every phone and tablet will have this feature by default going forward. 

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