Macintosh Healthcare

Avoiding or getting out of trouble

Always be patient, don’t be so quick to force quit applications or shut off the power, remember the machine isn’t a super being and does need time to process the requests entered. Always give an extra minute or so before resorting to force quit. Remember to try and save work to avoid loss of data.

If you must force quit, you can do so through 3 different ways:

1. click Apple menu to the top lefthand side of the screen and select force quit, from here you can quit application.

2. click and hold mouse on problematic application and select ‘force quit’

3. command option and escape

If all else fails you should hold down the power button to shut down the machine.

How to cure a persistent problem:

It is best to take a systemic approach by trying to trouble shoot the problem in a logical order, and to document your findings.

Split half search: eliminate possible causes until you are left with only one option e.g if your machine was to crash when you had you peripheral plugged in, but you have 8 different peripherals connected, instead of unplugging one at a time, unplug 4 of them and see if the problem still occurs, then repeat the process with the remaining four etc.

What to do if a file won’t open:

Try and open the application with a different programme if this is an alternative option: control, click and select open with – or drag and drop onto the application icon.

Or you can try using a different user account, as this means any current preferences will not be used in the new user account.

Or try and open the document in a different machine, this will immediately tell you if its is the file of the machine that is the problem.

Application won’t launch

The best option here is to try using the application within another user account (if you already have one): go to the top right hand corner and use the fast user switching option to select the other user account and then re-try the application.

or

Try and move the applications preference files, which are normally located in the preferences folders, inside the library folder, inside your hard drive.

If none of these techniques work then there is something wrong, and you will be best off removing and re-installing the programme.

Machine wont boot:

Try a safe boot: this is a way of booting a machine in a simplified state, which will tell you whether or not any additional applications are causing you machine to fail on start up, do this by starting up the computer and holding down the shift key.

The second option is to re-install your operating system using the archive and install method: start by inserting your OS cd, and holding down the ‘C’ key until you see the Apple logo appear, once the machine has booted, progress through the installer, until you get to the ‘select a destination’ screen, then click on ‘options’ at the bottom of the screen, which will reveal a new page, select the option ‘archive and install’ and press ok.

Be careful not to press any of the other options as you could wipe your hard drive!

Once this is done, the machine will re boot, you should then see a new folder called ‘previous systems’ where all your applications and data will be left untouched.

What to do if your hardware breaks down:

Confirm it is a hardware issue – this is important as you don’t want to send your machine away to be fixed only to find out that the problem was caused by something you could have resolved yourself!

How to rule out that the OS is the cause of the problem:

1. boot from OS install DVD, although this is fairly limited as the DVD only boots into the installer and not into the full operating system, so if you have a more subtle fault like iTunes not running then this method would not be able to help you

2. boot from an external firewire drive that has your OS installed, the advantage over the previous option is that you can get into the full operating system along with all the applications.

3. boot from a known working computer in ‘target disk’ mode. If you want to do this, you should boot the known working computer and hold down the ‘T’ key connecting a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire between the 2 computers then start your machine by holding down ‘alt’ key. This is will bring you to the start up manager where you can select the alternative machines hard drive as the boot device, it essentially achieves the same thing as an external firewire drive,