“Mac emergencies don’t happen often, but when they do it helps to know what to do — that’s the knowledge this short guide helps provide,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“Don’t overreact if things seem to be going wrong, but do ensure your Mac software is up to date and keep regular backups, just in case of problems,” Evans writes. “To identify if your Mac has a hardware problem disconnect your peripherals and update software drivers and run Apple Hardware tests.”
Evans covers:
• My printer’s stopped printing
• I forgot my OS X password
• My CD/DVD is stuck in the drive
• USB devices aren’t recognized
• General procedures
• Apple Hardware Test
• Zapping the PRAM
• Software tool kit
• Hardware you need
Read more in the full article here.
How about, no usb sync for iPhone? That one is driving me nuts
Evans mentions that a PRAM reset is “the closest thing to a nuclear option”. What BS. I’ve had a few times when I had to do a PRAM reset and have no idea what nuclear effect this should have had.
I guess everyone would start doing it without some warning, just look at all those memory cleaner crapps on the MAS.
As I recall, you lose some custom settings when you zap the parameter RAM (PRAM). It is not something that I did very often, even in the “classic” Mac OS days. I think that I might have tried it once with OS X in my desperation to solve an issue.
On classic Mac OS, you lost a lot of settings. I kept a list so I could reset them again.
But what’s in PRAM these days is stuff the OS needs to know and you don’t, in general. Zap away. But don’t expect it to solve much.
The last time I zapped the pram on a Mac. I was running OS 9. Lol
Me too.
“My CD/DVD is stuck in the drive”
Do what the person did in one of my wife’s support calls:
Smear peanut butter on a butter knife and grease up the CD/DVD liberally with it, then pry it out of there with the butter knife.
I’m pretty sure the peanut butter lube tactic is in the manual, we all saw, at purchase, but never opened.
Regarding “Software tool kit”:
His list is fine. I’d add in something that checks hard drive integrity. Lately my fave is Drive Genius 3. It has its clunky GUI moments, but it’s a great asset to own.
One thing I’ve done for eons is to have a second boot partition on all my Mac HDs. I regularly boot to it, like once a month, to check on my main boot drive. I run at least Disk Utilities repair (which is also on the recovery partition OS X installs) and DiskWarrior. But I also have at the ready:
– TechTool Pro (which I have automatically backing up my boot drive directory to the second partition in any case).
– Drive Genius as noted above.
– DiskTools Pro (which is not as good as Drive Genius, but it’s useful).
– ClamXav, the free/donationware anti-malware application. I keep it up-to-date in case some malware crap shows up one of these days. I also own Intego VirusBarrier, which is IMHO the best of the commercial anti-malware. I own it for my own interest. But I highly recommend it if you share your computer or a network that includes ‘LUSERS’ who magically find Trojan horse malware and infest their Macs with it.
Of the general cleanup utilities, I use MainMenu Pro. But most of the alternatives are fine. (Just don’t EVER install MacKeeper. OMG what a POS. It’s crapware from hell that has no place in the Mac community, IMHO of course).
I’ll second on the Intego and ClamXav. I also use Eset CyberSecurity, which does a very good job. Viruses may not be a threat to Mac, but trojan horses still are, and PC viruses can still “ride” through the Mac before they find a PC to infect.
TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, and DiskWarrior I’ve been using periodically, and they’re great maintenance programs. Most Macs, though, just need a good old “dusting” every once in a while. There’s no such thing as an invincible computer, but two things people need to do are backup, and backup. 😉
I have friends who like Eset as well as F-Secure.
The problem with the term ‘virus’ is that it was wrongly forced into a generic meaning for what is rightfully called malware. IOW it’s standard practice to use the term ‘virus’ incorrectly. Obviously the anti-malware companies don’t help by calling their software ‘anti-virus’, even though there have been ZERO actual viruses for OS X.
Because of competition, commercialization, pride, greed, ad nauseam, the ‘anti-virus’ companies are extremely secretive and possessive of their malware definition lists. Therefore, I currently find it impossible to know exactly how many malware there have been for OS X. For a long while I kept track of them all. But lately it’s been literally insane trying to sort it out. My best guess at the moment is about 115 malware for OS X, that being since 2000.
Most of them were Trojan horses, stuff innocently, or illogically installed by the user onto their machine, typically through ‘social engineering’ aka a con-job.
Currently, the single most dangerous software to run on a Mac are:
1) The Java browser plug-in.
2) Adobe Flash.
Dump those two and you’re highly unlikely to get infected. These two horrors of software allow ‘drive-by’ infection, automatic botting of your computer. This has nothing to do with Apple. It’s strictly a problem with Oracle (I hate you Oracle) and Adobe.
Apple has a built-in system for identifying most (not all) malware and preventing it from installing. It’s called XProtect. But the Mac security watch group I belong to identified several malware Apple missed. We pestered Apple in public and they finally relented and caught up. This behavior is sadly typical of Apple. It’s like riding a sine wave. Apple gets serious this month. Apple drops the ball the next month. *sigh*
My repair experience is not going to be the same as most others. I am bashing on my two contemporary Macs all day long. One of my hard drives is past three years old, my usual cutoff date. I’m saving for a fancy schmantzy new MBP, so I muddle lthrough. Lately, I have one partition that likes to corrupt itself about once a week. But the running tool from Drive Genius immediately catches it and tells me to fix it. So far I have NO bad sectors, so that’s reassuring.
I’ve given lectures here about The First Rule Of Computing here endless times. AKA: Make A Backup. I’m cruel about it too: If you don’t back up, you get what you deserve. It’s not heartless. It’s saving your butt. Two backups! One local, one off site, every day.
At least I didn’t go into full blown mad professor lecture mode today. 😉
There is no Utilities\Password reset tool. You have to do it through terminal now.