Advice from an Apple Tech: Three common Mac fixes. You learn a lot after four months of working at a tech shop window. Between October of 2012 and February of 2013, I was part of the University of California Berkeley’s tech repair window staff. The Apple certifications had been earned, the time had been put in, and it was time to see if a geek who pretty much lived to tinker with Macs could help the university’s 38,000-plus student body with whatever disasters happened—especially at the 11th hour with everything due at once. The tech window is gone now (swept away as part of a mandatory building renovation and moved to a smaller store across the street), but over the course of more than 200 repairs for the wearied and panicked tides that crashed the tech shop window, I figured that there were three incredibly common Mac problems that you can easily fix yourself or at least limit the damage.
Click…click…click The lesson to be learned here: Invest in a few items that your computer will need to protect your data and back up. Take care. 5 More Quick Fixes to Common Mac Problems. In the first of our two-part tutorial we looked at five quick fixes to your Mac’s most common problems. In this second part, we’ll continue by looking at five more quick fixes that will help you resolve many of your Mac’s common problems. Tip: Before you get started with this tutorial, we recommend that you take a look at part-one of our tutorial on quick fixes. The Fix List Before we begin, all the fixes we’re showing you are perfectly safe as long as you enter them (or perform them) exactly as described. This second part of our tutorial will detail more in-depth fixes. Safe Mode Fix Type: Keyboard Shortcut Safe Mode is a troubleshooting step best suited if you’ve noticed that right after a new software installation or update, your Mac will no longer boot.
Safe Mode always takes a long time to boot. It clears a variety of caches during boot and will not load a lot of software that OS X would normally load. Tip: More detailed information on Safe Mode is available over at Apple Support. OnyX. 5 Quick Fixes to Common Mac Problems. As Mac users we’re used to not having to frequently troubleshoot our computer problems. However, that doesn’t mean that our Macs don’t misbehave from time to time. In this first of a two-part tutorial, we’ll detail five quick fixes to your Mac’s most common problems. What’s a quick fix? It’s exactly what it sounds like - it’s something that is very simple (usually a key combination or quick command) that is the first attempt by technicians to repair a problem quickly and simply.
In tech support, time is a crucial factor for both technician and user. The user has to experience downtime and the technician is usually performance-measured on time to fix. Since most common issues are reasonably simple to resolve (despite the symptoms) then trying a ten-second fix makes much more sense than spending hours on a convoluted troubleshooting process. “Other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one” - Ockham’s Razor The Fix List Power Cycle The Fix What Will it Fix? How to Troubleshoot the Four Most Common "Oh Sh*t" Mac Problems.
Quick fixes for 10 common Mac problems. 20 tips to help you work smarter with OS X. MacFormat magazine has reached its 200th issue and to celebrate, they've published 200 unmissable Mac tips. Here are 20 that caught our eye. For the full 200, pick up a copy of MacFormat in your local newsagent's - on sale now. 1. Disk Utility Disk Utility, located in the Applications > Utilities folder, is more versatile than it at first appears. Not only does it let you run disk verification and repair, it's also able to burn CDs and DVDs and erase rewritable discs.
In addition it's where you erase, rename and partition hard drives and set up RAID systems. Disk Utility can create byte-for-byte clones of existing drives or discs as well as creating blank disk images for you to populate with content. 2. When you first set up your Mac and create an account, it assumes you are using it at home and makes you an Administrator. Go to System Preferences > Accounts and choose your account. 3.
You can right-click on any item in OS X or select it and choose File > Get Info. 4. 5. 6. 50 Common Mac Problems Solved. Posted 11/04/2009 at 3:39pm | by The Mac|Life Staff & Scott Rose We present the Ultimate Mac Troubleshooting Guide, so you can banish the peskiest problems once and for all. Mac problems? Isn’t that an oxymoron? If you just switched to the Mac from Windows, you might be thinking that you accidentally picked up one of your old PC magazines--and, by the way, we’ve got solutions to the seven most common problems switchers encounter, too. Using a Mac is generally painless and trouble free, but things can go wrong. We’re here to help you tackle the 50 most common problems in eight different categories, once and for all.
General Mac Problems The Mac OS is, fundamentally, as trouble-free as operating systems get. 1. Download the incredibly versatile Path Finder ($40, www.cocoatech.com), which gives you all sorts of features that are missing from the Finder, such as tabs, stacks, bookmarks, and panes. Now THIS is the Finder we've always dreamed of. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. In Search Of...Search Solutions.