Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac

✍ Scribed by Joe Kissell

• Publisher: TidBITS
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Series: Take Control
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The 17 basic troubleshooting procedures (along with the reasons why they can help) you'll learn are:

Restart your Mac

Force-quit an application

Start up from another volume

Run disk-repair utilities

Erase and restore from backup

Repair permissions

Start up in safe mode

Turn off login items

Check preference files

Reset PMU, SMU, SMC, NVRAM, or PRAM

Use Activity Monitor

Check free disk space

Check log files

Clear caches

Check your RAM

Test for reproducibility

Get system information

Joe also explains how to solve 15 common problems, including:

Your computer won't turn on

Your computer keeps turning itself off

You experience repeated kernel panics

Your Mac is abnormally slow

You can't empty the Trash

An application grinds to a halt

An application crashes

The keyboard or mouse doesn't work

You lose your Internet connection

Printing doesn't work

Spotlight searches fail

Keychain (seemingly) forgets passwords

Apple Mail fails to connect

Time Machine misbehaves

A volume won't unmount

✦ Subjects

Computer Technology; Nonfiction; COM046020; COM050020