New Tips And Triks For You

If you run into any problem with your Mac, there is a general set of steps and checks you can take to troubleshoot it. While these are not guaranteed to get you an answer or necessarily fix your system, they should at least get you closer to a solution.

First, generally characterize the problem by asking yourself what is happening. Notice any errors and behaviors, and other actions you are taking that lead up to the problem at hand. For example, if the system hangs, does this occur for about 30 seconds every time you boot, or does it happen at regular intervals, or perhaps is it random in nature?

In addition, ask yourself how long the problem has been happening, and whether or not it came about after any changes you made to the system, including software installs, upgrades, and changes to system settings.

With these ideas in mind, you can perform a number of tests to determine if the problem is hardware-related, or software-related, and in doing so hopefully narrow down the culprit.

Hardware troubleshooting Update peripheral firmware and drivers

Even if troubleshooting peripherals by unplugging or re-ordering them does not make a difference, still consider checking for and applying both firmware and drive software updates to the device. Check with your devices' manufacturers to see if there are firmware updates available, and install them. This is especially true if you have recently upgraded or updated your system software.

Run Apple Hardware Tests

Apple provides a test suite for all of its Mac systems, which will run a test on the RAM as well as check a number of different hardware sensors to ensure the system is running within voltage, amperage, and temperature tolerances. To access the tests, reboot your system with the D key held, or Option-D to load the tests form the Internet, and from there you can run and interpret the tests.

Reset the PRAM and SMC

The only real hardware-based fixes you can do for your Mac, at least without opening it or getting it serviced, are to reset the Parameter RAM (PRAM) and system management controller (SMC). The PRAM can be reset by booting with the Option-Command-P-R keys held down, but resetting your SMC will require you to hold down a special combination of keys specific to your Mac's model.

Software troubleshooting Check Activity Monitor

Open Activity Monitor and sort the various process lists by the %CPU, Memory, or Energy columns, to see if any program is regularly using up system resources. If one is persistently at the top of the list, then consider investigating it to see whether the activity seen is normal.

Check filesystem formatting

Use Disk Utility to both check the boot drive for errors, and to fix its permissions. To do this thoroughly, you will need to boot to the OS X Recovery partition and then use Disk Utility to verify and repair the hard drive. You can also run a permissions fix on the drive, to ensure system files are properly accessible. In addition to a full system permissions fix, you can reset the permissions on home folders in your user account, which will ensure programs, services, and anything else that runs under your account has proper access to the resources it needs.

Reinstall OS X

While the idea of reinstalling an OS seems pretty invasive, Apple has made it almost seamless, where doing so will preserve your installed applications, settings, files, and other data you use. Performing a reinstall of OS X simply requires you boot into Recovery mode, and then select the option to reinstall OS X. This will simply replace all the core system files with fresh ones, which sometimes can be a quick fix for a damaged OS installation.

Sometimes you can search for a "Combo" updater for your version of OS X from Apple's Support Downloads Web site, but while this will replace system files, it will do so only for the subset of those changed by the update. To ensure all files are replaced, perform a full reinstall followed by installing the relevant combo updater, or simply run Software Update in the Apple menu.

Even if these steps do not fix the problem, you can make a note of whether or not they help isolate it. If the problem stops occurring, or shows specific behavior when you perform the steps above, then you can convey these to a technician or online help resource to get better insight on what to do next.

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