troubleshooting

This week I cleared Vista out of my home office by upgrading a 6-year-old PC to Windows 7. The machine was in dire need of a tune-up. I figured the money spent on a Win 7 upgrade would extend the desktop PC's life span and save me hours of system maintenance time.

When I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, the program warned me that the machine's ATI Radeon Xpress 200 display driver and Realtek Audio Manager utility were out-of-date. The PC was otherwise good to go, which was a pleasant surprise considering it shipped in 2005 with … Read more

Apple's support discussion forum has been a popular location for Mac users to interact with and get help from other Mac users. Last year, Apple announced that the forums would be evolving into a new social-based site called Apple Support Communities, but for the past seven months there has been no further information about the changes, until yesterday when new the Communities site went live.

The new support site is now very user-centric and has a different layout and feel to it, so if you have frequently used the Apple discussions you might initially be confused by the changes. … Read more

Every application and utility serves some purpose, but for every program created there is likely another (at least) that performs the same or similar task. For instance, there are a number of Web browsers, office suites, and text editors available in addition to multiple maintenance utilities, disk utilities, and file recovery suites. While having just one program that performs a specific function will suffice most of the time, if it stops working or if bugs in its code prevent it from working then you may find yourself limited.

I was recently contacted by MacFixIt reader "Terry" who was … Read more

I was recently asked to help fix a high-visibility Web site that was performing poorly. I'd like to share some of the lessons--not learned, but reinforced--by the experience.

Fix the problem, not the blame. "We're in trouble! Help!" calls are fraught with embarrassment. Who, after all, wants to admit they have a problem? Many feel they "should" be able to "handle it ourselves," without sending up an emergency flare or asking for assistance. This latest was a straightforward "we can't get decent performance, and it's getting critical!" situation. … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for two maintenance utilities and one system tool for managing OS X "launchd" configuration files.

Maintenance

Two popular utilities for running general maintenance routines in OS X are Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner and MacCleanse. … Read more

Google's Chrome browser is noted for being faster and smaller than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. That's why it caught me by surprise when Gmail wouldn't load in Chrome but would open without a problem in Firefox and IE.

A quick Web search led to a thread on the Chrome Help forum dating back to March 2009 but updated as recently as this month. Several solutions to the Gmail slowdown were proposed in the thread, but it appears that Google engineers haven't yet figured out why Gmail sometimes balks in Chrome.

The fix … Read more

Microsoft has made it easier to browse for help when one of its products acts up. The revamped Fix It Solution Center boils troubleshooting down to three steps: pick a product (optional), choose a fix in one of eight categories (and handful of optional subcategories), and then view or run one of Microsoft's many proposed solutions.

Of course, the real test is whether these auto-repair tools actually do any good. I haven't done enough testing to form an opinion one way or the other. However, the online Fix It tools differ from the troubleshooting utilities built into Windows … Read more

Apple has released an update to its professional image-editing software Aperture, now version 3.1, as well as a handful of helpful troubleshooting knowledge base articles and information documents.

As with any update, it is recommended to create a stable backup of all your important data should anything unexpected go wrong with the installation of the new software.… Read more

As a long-time Mac troubleshooting researcher and consultant, one of my favorite and perhaps the most valuable Mac knowledge sites online is Apple's own Support Discussions forums. According to an official post on the site, the forums will be receiving a makeover, becoming more socially inclined by adding feature sets like avatars, homepages, and widgets. … Read more