Sometimes things go horribly wrong. It's at those times, your moments of need, that it's good to have somewhere to turn.
It's not enough to just have people around you, they need to know how to do things, what do you need to do when all hope is lost and your PS4 just won't cooperate?
You need to know you can turn to ask someone and say "hey, I need to know how to hard reset my PS4, can you help?"
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Well, good news, that's exactly where we come in. If your PS4 is feeling a little sluggish or just not listening to you, like an unruly child, you may have to perform a factory reset on it.
For the record, you don't do that to an unruly child, you just have to tell them off or maybe give them a hug.
A factory reset means you'll have to reinstall your software, redownload any saves, and mess around with other settings to get it back to how you like it.
A hard reset will blow out the cobwebs, restore the factory settings, and get your PS4 back to its old self (hopefully giving it more than enough life to survive until the PS5 comes out).
This is how you do it:
- Go to PlayStation Network/Account Management > Activate as Your Primary PS4.
- Choose Deactivate and then manually restart the console.
- After you sign in again, navigate to Settings.
- Choose Initialization, and then pick Initialize PS4.
- When you’re ready, select Full, and then confirm with Initialize and then Yes.Plan in a few hours for this to happen.
- Once finished, follow the on-screen instructions.
One that's done you'll need to download your games again and set up your account too.
It's a lot of work, but it should mean that your PS4 is back to full power again once it's all over.
If you've got other consoles that need a hard reset then we can help you with that too.
If, and this always sucks, you know you need to get a new console instead, then you can have a look at our best PS4 bundles, hopefully, they can make things a little easier on you.