Troubleshooting A Broken Mac: Good, Bad, And Ugly.

Thursday, May 29, 2008 | Tips and Tricks | Read or Post a Comment

MacPro What do you do when your Mac goes wonky? Panic? Cry? Curse? Carry it to the nearest Apple Store?

I troubleshoot. Why? It’s the most time consuming and expensive and frustrating solution available. I don’t ask for directions when I’m lost. Why ask for help when my Mac goes wonky?

Fortunately, down through the years, I have had few problems with my Macs, and some of those I figured out what was wrong, and that gave me confidence to keep up the prayer, trial, and error.... (excerpted).

4 Reader Comments

crock buster said:

What a crock, dude. Cheap PCs are just that. They’re cheap. The quality of every component on a cheap PC is less than on any Mac. Period.

Believe it or not, but Macs run more software than Windows PCs. They run Mac software, Linux and Linux software, and Windows and all Windows software.

PCs get viruses because Windows is inherently insecure and Windows users are stupid.

PCs are a pain to use, a pain to maintain, and full of pain. Why are more people switching to the “more expensive” Mac than switch from Mac to Windows PCs?

Do the math, dude. And stop drinking Microsoft’s poisoned Kool-Aid. Windows is slowly dying…

John said:

PC’s are much cheaper with higher quality parts, easier/cheaper to repair, can run much much more software, easier/cheaper to upgrade, easier/cheaper to expand. PC’s also come in more colors and types and quality.

PC’s get more viruses but only because they are used much more. It’s like going into a room of 4 people, you might not catch a cold but increase that room size to 100 people and the odds would go up that you would catch a cold.

PC’s might take a little bit of time to learn vs opening the box and turning the on button, but in the learning process you become educated and learn many new things and options that will make your computer experience better.

satcomer said:

For that original disconnection notice is to reset your Pram. I find resetting the Pram fixes a lot of things.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Bonobo said:

Getting to the heart of whether there is a hardware or software issue to contend with is often at the heart of a lot of problems.

As a standard procedure, just have an external bootable HD, with a “clean OS” and applications that is kept for testing, so you can verify if it is OS or Application related, and thus have a chance of continuing on with work, until you can fix the internal HD.

If uptime is really an issue, keep your home folder off on a separate partition, so that you can switch to another boot partition/HD in a blink. You can find instructions for doing that in various help areas or books.

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