Maintaining your Mac means preventing problems and knowing what to do when they strike. The four tips are our four best ways of solving common issues and keeping your Mac healthy.
If you suspect a hardware problem unrelated to your Mac’s hard drive, troubleshoot with these three steps:
Run the Apple Hardware Test to confirm or deny your suspicions. Instructions for MacBook Air owners can be found at support.apple.com/kb/ht2644. Owners of other Macs can follow these directions: support.apple.com/kb/ht1509.
Reset your SMC (System Management Controller) to alleviate common problems with fans, power management, sleep, or lights with these steps: support.apple.com/kb/HT3964.
Resetting your PRAM and NVRAM (support.apple.com/kb/HT1379) can alleviate problems with volume, screen resolution, and startup disk selection.
If your computer is running slowly, files are disappearing, or you get a question mark at startup, the problem may be your hard drive. Try these two things before buying a new one:
Use Apple’s free tools to repair your drive. Boot in Safe Mode, run Disk Utility from your Mac OS X Install disc, or run fsck. These functions are described in detail at support.apple.com/kb/TS1417.
Disk Warrior is a must-have disk utility that has saved our butts more than once!
Use Disk Warrior ($100, alsoft.com) to rebuild the drive’s directory, which can repair corruption and prolong the life of your drive.
A few megabytes of prevention are worth a gigabyte of cure. Here are two ways to prevent a trip to the Genius Bar:
Use Cocktail’s ($15, maintain.se) Pilot function to perform UNIX maintenance scripts on your Mac, clear all the caches on your system, and repair disk permissions.
With just one click, Cocktail’s automated Pilot will clean, repair, and optimize your system.
If you want to feel like your very own Genius, run Drive Genius 3 ($99, prosofteng.com), which offers a variety of system maintenance tools and is used by Apple’s Genius Bars in their ProCare Yearly Tune Up.
When all else fails, try reinstalling Mac OS X 10.6 from the original installation DVD, performing what was formerly known as an “Archive and Install” of your operating system. This process doesn’t require much time and can often solve big problems that aren’t hardware related. Afterward, be sure to update your software by choosing Apple Menu > Software Updates.
One of our favorite catch-all solutions is to reinstall Snow Leopard from scratch.
gryphster
February 14, 2011 at 7:22pm
Huh?
"So the easiest solution is to purchase an AirPort Extreme and a NAS (short for “network attached storage”) drive, keep your library on the NAS, and use MediaRover to make sure all your computers use that one central library."
Easy as pie.
JohnnyMan
February 10, 2011 at 10:25am
Thank you for these types of articles. I am a relatively new user (2 years) and I can't get enough of these "How to" types of articles.
Thanks again.
Dp aj4
January 26, 2011 at 4:56pm
After doing the 4th tip under "terminal tricks" to create a stack for recent items, my iMac won't respond. HELP!!! can anyone help me to recover. Did anyone actually test these "tricks".
Guess I should know that executing a command with'kill' in it wouldn't be a good thing
jerryfx
January 19, 2011 at 1:28pm
I have had a problem with the data on my Mac not synchronizing with the MobileMe site. Repeated resets did not seem to help. However, I have found that restoring my iCal data from the saved archive before resetting/restoring to MobileMe seems to do the trick. Very strange, but it seems to work.
Blskny
January 19, 2011 at 9:32am
Keep trying to put the spacers in the doc. Love the organization tool but it is not working. Here is the message I keep getting:
2011-01-19 11:24:13.499 defaults[43792:903] Could not parse: {"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}defaults. Try single-quoting it.
I changed the double quotes to single quotes but it is still not working. Would really appreciate clarification.
THANKS!!!
veri
January 15, 2011 at 3:37am
You forgot an easy fix for most software issues:
Delete (or better yet; rename) the applications settings folder from your library. This forces the application to rebuild it, and it usually fixes any issues with corrupted or obsolete settings.
In most cases, the application will start to behave properly again.
