My phone or laptop is dying — what do I try before replacing it?

Three of the commonest death notices are not deaths. A hot, slow laptop is usually suffocating, a phone that will not charge is usually full of pocket fluff, and a wet phone is usually killed by being switched on, not by the water. Each page below is the two-minute check before the shop.

The slowdown is usually dust. The slowdown is usually dust says a laptop announces this problem in an order: first the fan gets loud, then the palm rest gets warm, then everything gets slow, and by the third symptom many owners are pricing replacements. The machine is not dying; it is suffocating. Dust mats into a felt blanket on the fan and heat fins, the fan spins harder, the heat lingers, and the processor protects itself by deliberately slowing down, so the slowness is a symptom pretending to be a diagnosis. The free fixes come first: a hard, flat surface, never bedding or a couch, and lift the rear edge so air can move underneath; a finger’s height of clearance is the whole engineering requirement. Cleaning is the durable fix: canned air, short bursts, fan held still, machine off, with the honest limit that dust matted into felt needs the case opened. The page carries the argument about whose hands open it, four accounts for yourself to three for a shop, and its decider is your model’s teardown difficulty, your warranty and your history with small screws. Two software levers while you decide: check what is actually running, because malware and runaway background processes imitate heat-slowness, and cap the processor’s maximum speed a notch in power settings.

Your charging port is full of pocket lint. Your charging port is full of pocket lint says a very common reason a phone stops charging is not a fault at all: months of fabric fibres pushed to the bottom of the port and packed into something like felt, holding the plug a fraction of a millimetre away from the pins. The tells: the cable has to be held at an angle or wiggled, charging stops if the phone is nudged, and a new cable behaves exactly like the old one, which is usually the point at which people decide the phone is finished. Phone off first, then something non-conductive and gentle: a plastic toothpick or a floss pick used handle-first, scraping outward along the sides and floor of the port. The page’s safety rule is close to unanimous there: nothing metal goes in, not a paper clip, needle, tweezers or pin, because the pins inside are tiny and live; no vacuum, and no blowing into it with your mouth. If it still will not charge, a shop can replace the port for a small fraction of a new phone, which is not always the advice offered at a counter.

Switch the wet phone off and leave it off. Switch the wet phone off and leave it off is the repair technicians’ correction to the whole internet’s rice. Four separate conversations there say the water is not what kills the device, the current is: the tap-to-see-if-it-works, the plug-in-to-check. Switch it off, tap it gently against your hand opening down, take the case off, stand it in moving air, and do not check for two days. Rice was never doing the work; the two days were. The page carries the rice defenders’ five-to-four, and its decider is what is in the cupboard; silica gel that is actually dry beats rice. The three lines above every trick: no oven, microwave or hot hair dryer, ever; a battery that is warm, swelling, hissing or smelling sweet goes outside on concrete, away from you and anything that burns, and stays there; and never dunk a sealed modern phone in alcohol, which dissolves the adhesives. When it comes back on, back it up that day, because the corrosion keeps growing after the water is gone.

The tab you just lost has an undo button. The tab you just lost has an undo button is the smallest rescue in the library and the one that fires when something felt lost: Ctrl+Shift+T, Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac, brings back the tab you just closed, with its history intact, and pressing again walks backward through everything you have closed. Private windows forget on purpose and Safari prefers Cmd+Z. Close a tab on purpose today and bring it back once.

Who this is not for. The dust page’s own map: if you clear the dust, fix the surface, lift the back and the heat persists, its caveats box is where to go next, not this page. The wet-phone page says if the device is under warranty, call the maker before anything clever, and if it is a sealed, glued modern device you are not going to open, a service centre is the only real option. And the two pages on ports and water are about phones; what to do with an old hard drive is this answer’s own signpost, to the library’s answer on destroying old documents and protecting your identity.