“When it comes to troubleshooting, I always try the simplest things first, and these tricks have been successful in solving some 90 percent of the Mac problems I’ve encountered,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet.
“I’ve used these to solve a wide variety of weird Mac issues, ranging from poor performance and systems not wanting to boot up (or are taking a long time to boot) to the fans running crazy or the screen being blank,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “The following is information that all Mac owners should know, and it can help prevent you from having to take an unnecessary trip to see a Genius at your nearest Apple Store.”
Covered item include:
• Reset the SMC (System Management Controller)
• Reset the NVRAM (NonVolatile Random-Access Memory)/PRAM (Parameter RAM)
• Run Disk Utility
• Run Apple Diagnostics (Note that, on older systems, this test is called Apple Hardware Test.)
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, yes: Zap that PRAM! (Of course, afterwards that’ll require a trip into System Preferences to readjust any settings that were reset, like volume, display resolution, startup disk, time zone, etc.)
If you’ve ever had to do a hard reboot, then you likely need to run DiskWarrior to rebuild your catalog index. None of that other stuff ever did much for me. DiskWarrior is it.