How-Tos

For various reasons, applications originally installed by the Mac OS X Installer disc (DVD or CD) -- Mail.app, Activity Viewer, etc. -- can become unusable. This can occur due to user deletion, corruption of drive sectors, and other problems. Unfortunately, some of these applications are not available as standalone downloads.

However, virtually all of these applications can be restored with the use of a shareware utility called Pacifist, which will extract the application file(s) in question from the various .pkg containers on the Mac OS X installer disc and put them back in the proper location on your … Read more

Our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes, covers products that can help you maintain and fix your Mac.

There are times when you, as a troubleshooter, may need to modify files that aren't owned by you -- most frequently when the files you want to work with are owned by the OS itself ("system" or the "root" user). For example, perhaps you've found, by reading a site such as MacFixIt or by being told by someone a bit more savvy than you, that editing … Read more

Ted Landau June 2005

In last month's column, I began a look at some of the "smaller" troubleshooting-related changes in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), focusing on changes to the "unexpectedly quit" dialog. This month, I explore several other troubleshooting enhancements to Tiger.

Safe Boots. Apple introduced the Safe Boot in Panther. Essentially, holding down the Shift key immediately after hearing the chimes at startup in Panther resulted in two separate actions: (1) a disk repair check was done -- as would otherwise require selecting "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility's First … Read more

Dan Frakes May 2005

Our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes, covers products that can help you maintain -- and, if necessary, fix -- your Mac.

One of the most serious problems that can afflict your Mac is "bad memory" -- the common term for a defective RAM chip. Although the vast majority of RAM modules work perfectly, making RAM troubles a rare malady, it can be quite frustrating when you're one of the unlucky ones. At the worst, bad RAM can prevent your Mac from even starting up. But it … Read more

Ted Landau May 2005

[Note: This is the first of a few columns where I explore the "smaller" changes in Mac OS X 10.4. These are changes that, while they may not get much publicity, are quite relevant for troubleshooting.]

Among the many new features in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), there is one that Apple has never mentioned its marketing material. Probably, this is because it has to do with a topic that Apple rarely talks about anyway: application crashes. I'm talking about those times when the "unexpectedly quit" dialog appears on … Read more

Dan Frakes

Today marks the first installment of our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes. Each month, Dan will talk about one or two products that can help you maintain -- and, if necessary, fix -- your Mac.

For the most part, Mac OS X doesn't need a lot of day to day maintenance -- it crashes less than the "classic" Mac OS, and individual application problems are less likely to affect other applications and the operating system itself, so most users will find that serious file, drive, and directory damage … Read more

Ted Landau April 2005

Over the past year, I have had to fly back and forth between Michigan and California several times. I used my desktop Mac for booking my flights online; the idea here was to save time and money from booking the ?old-fashioned way.? On flight days, I took my PowerBook with me of course. My plan was that to use the laptop to help pass the time. I might get some work done on an article or just watch a movie on DVD. Unfortunately, my ideas and plans turned out to have very little in common with … Read more

Ted Landau March 2005

Many troubleshooting articles focus on how to get yourself out of some troubleshooting jam. In this article, I instead want to look at the other side of the table: How to keep yourself out of trouble in the first place. I will not be covering here any of the oft-cited maintenance routines (such as repairing permissions or running cron jobs). Instead, I will be covering even more basic advice that is also, in most cases, even more simple to do. Despite this, it is advice that is too often ignored...at the user?s peril.

One of the most frustrating problems under Mac OS X 10.3.x are system-wide freezes where nothing short of a manual restart will resolve the situation. There are many causes for this issue, and an equally high number of solutions.

Heavy network activity Some system-wide freezes can be directly linked to heavy network activity. The problem is most common when users are transferring data through a file sharing application like BitTorrent, but also can also occur under other high-load circumstances.

In some cases, Macs seemingly succumbed to a system-wide freeze due to this problem actually recover after a few … Read more