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.
If you’re used to an older operating system, beware: very few pages of the traditional troubleshooting workbook apply to Mac OS X. Mac OS 9 veterans can forget about 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 or 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.
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 is, only people with Administrator accounts are allowed to make changes, as indicated ...
Get Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
