Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Appendix B. Troubleshooting

Whether it’s a car engine or an operating system, anything with several thousand parts can develop the occasional technical hiccup. Mac OS X is far more resilient than its predecessors, but it’s still a complex system with the potential for occasional glitches.

Beware, however: very few pages of the traditional troubleshooting workbook apply to Mac OS X. Traditional Mac fans can forget about all the conventional rituals, including giving a program more memory, turning off system extensions, and rebuilding the desktop; Windows refugees can forget all about driver conflicts, IRQs, and the Registry.

In short, Mac OS X is a whole new world when it comes to troubleshooting.

It’s safe to say that you’ll have to do less troubleshooting in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9 and Windows, especially considering that most freaky little glitches go away if you just try these two steps, one at a time:

• Quit and restart the wayward program.

• Log out and log back in again.

It’s the other problems that will drive you batty. Ladies and gentlemen, here it is: the new Macintosh troubleshooting curriculum.

Problems That Aren’t Problems

Before you panic, accept the possibility that whatever is frustrating you is a Mac OS X difference, not a Mac OS X problem. Plenty of “problems” turn out simply to be quirks of the way Mac OS X works. For example:

• My System Preferences controls are dimmed. As noted in Chapter 8, many of Mac OS X’s control panels are off-limits to standard account holders. That ...