You ask — we answer!

This question from our #AskArcher show is about smart phones — how often should you completely turn yours off?

See the answer here:

How often should you turn off your phone?

We asked Patrick C. Miller of Archer International, Archer News Network’s parent company, for advice.

“There are some security implications to it,” said Miller.

Phone apps can have problems, like “hanging” in memory, that chew through your battery and eat up space on your phone, he said.

“It makes it hard for other apps to run,” he added. “So, turning it off once a week or so is probably not a bad idea. Just shut it down, let it rest for a minute and then bring it back up.”

Turning it on and off won’t necessarily kill any malware on your phone, according to Miller.

“I would say 90% or higher of malware written today actually writes itself to the phone in a way that when you turn it off and turn it back on, the malware just starts itself back up again,” he explained. “So, you’re not really going to get rid of some of that kind of malware by rebooting the phone.” 

But you could get some other unpleasant things off your phone if you turn it off.

“There are some things that run only in memory and don’t actually write to your phone’s memory, to the hard memory in your phone,” he said. “They run on what is called RAM. RAM goes away when you turn off your phone. So, those would go away, for example.”

One of those unpleasant things — a cryptocurrency miner that is stealing your phone’s power and computing power to “dig up” digital money.

“For the current state of affairs with things like cryptocurrency miners and memory malware, it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and shut it down every week or so and then bring it back up,” he said.