#Preventive maintenance for mac mac os x

It's the equivalent of OS 9's 'System Bomb' message. When this happens, the Mac's screen dims and a multi-lingual message appears instructing you to restart the computer. Select the troubled program from the list - often the unresponsive program will be highlighted in red - and click on the ∿orce Quit button.īut the worst scenario in OS X is a kernel panic, a total system crash. To bring up a menu of running programs, hold down the Command-Option-Escape keys simultaneously. In OS 9, this meant rebooting, but in OS X you can force-quit the offending program without causing general system problems.

#Preventive maintenance for mac mac os x

If Mac OS X becomes unresponsive, it could be that one program has locked up. The good news is, however, that less goes wrong in OS X system crashes are rare, and usually are caused by hardware issues.

A detailed explanation with illustrations of where to find an application's preferences may be found in the Tutorial archives of the Creative Mac Web site.īeyond those procedures, troubleshooting and maintaining OS X is all new territory. The path: Macintosh HD/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences. Most, however, are in the preferences folder buried in the library folder in your users folder. The difference in OS X is that the preference files are no longer stored together in the same folder. If one application is misbehaving, trashing the preferences still works.Fortunately, a few tips I have gleaned from 16 months of using OS X should help hesitant OS 9 users become more comfortable with the new system.įirst, a few troubleshooting tips from OS 9 still hold true: Many OS 9 users fear upgrading because they know that when something does go awry in OS X, all their years of Mac experience will be almost useless. Last January, it made OS X the default operating system on new Macs in May CEO Steve Jobs declared OS 9 'dead' to developers in September Apple said that Mac models introduced or upgraded in 2003 only would boot OS X. 'īut Apple's campaign to push OS 9 users over to OS X has grown more intense in the past year. The other 80 percent still are using some version of the original Mac operating system, the final version of which was Mac OS 9.Īpple, based in Cupertino, Calif., says the transition is on schedule, but most folks have no desire to change their operating system some of it is inertia, some of it is fear: 'If it ain't broke. Of the estimated 25 million Mac users in the world, only about 20 percent have moved to Mac OS X, according to Apple. Until recently, most Mac users who had switched to the graphically appealing, much more stable OS X were the 'early adopters' and 'power users' like myself who feel compelled to have the latest thing. Most longtime users of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh machines know their way around its venerable operating system, OS 9, pretty well.īut if they've purchased a new Mac or boldly installed OS X on an existing machine, they find themselves facing an almost completely alien computing environment.įor OS 9 users who have avoided making the transition, the day of reckoning is fast approaching.