Scrubbing a MotoQ

As noted before, I’ve moved on from my Motorola Q.  I’d love to donate it to a worthy cause, or even turn it in at the upcoming TechBirmingham Ecycling Day.  BUT, I want to see it depart clean as a whistle.  So, here’s what I did…

FIRST, get rid of all email accounts.  Enter the email function, select any account and choose the soft menu “Menu”, “Options” submenu choice.  Next, select “Account Options” and highlight (do NOT select) the account which you wish to delete.  Select the soft menu “Menu” at this point and choose the “Delete” submenu choice.  You will be warned with the following message:

All messages that are linked to “xxxxxx” will be cleared.  All messages in the Outbox will be cleared too. Continue?

Of course, you want to select the “Yes” soft menu.  Depending on how many emails are in the account, give it a minute or two.  Repeat for each account.

SECOND… If you look in the Options section, you’ll notice that this does NOT work, however for Text or MMS Messages… so another tactic is required.  So, exit out completely and first re-enter the text messages list.  Choose the soft menu “Menu”, but select “Folders” INSTEAD of Options.  While the screen shows you Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Outbox, and Sent Items… choose the soft menu “Menu” again, and select the “Delete All” for each and every entry in the list of 5 items.  When I did this, it cleared the several hundred (thousands?) of text messages from the outbox and inbox of my Motorola Q… it does NOT give a ‘working’ image, so you’ve got to be patient because after selecting the “Yes” soft menu, it looks like it hangs.  Be patient (I’m not!) and eventually it will clear all of your SMS discussions.  Eventually, I clicked on the stop button (red circle) and went back into my SMS folders.  One text message in my draft folder was still there and needed to be manually deleted, but the sent and in boxes were correctly cleared.

THIRD, remove your MMS activity.  See SMS instructions and repeat in the MMS directory… especially remembering to highlight each of the 5 items in the folders.

FOURTH, remove your Mini SD card.  You did set your card as the storage location for all pictures and music, right?

You could let go now, but what about your sync’d contacts and calendar items??  Surely, you don’t want those falling into someone else’s hands.  I haven’t found a clean way of cleaning up these without losing my data on the laptop itself, so a MASTER RESET is in my future.  Start>system tools>hard reset gets you there… you’ll want your battery charged because removing the battery while performing the reset could have adverse affects.  You *did* remove your SD card, right??  No matter, the hard reset doesn’t affect it <smile>.  I guess that I could have just reset the phone instead of performing the first 3 steps above, but now YOU know how to clean up your MotoQ if you need want to stop short of a hard reset.

Now, time to pack up all the peripherals and pass this well-used device onto its next lucky user!