Chapter 6: Troubleshooting Problems and Seeking Help

Overview

Sooner or later, even the most knowledgeable Mac power user encounters problems — and you will eventually need to troubleshoot Mac OS X Panther to determine what is wrong before you can fix it. Troubleshooting is an acquired skill that takes practice and logical deduction. Luckily, however, Panther is very reliable, so you should not have to troubleshoot often, and Apple provides you with tools that you can use to track down both hardware and software tribulations.

But what if you cannot fix what is broken? Even Apple tech support technicians are stumped from time to time. Therefore, it is important to know where to turn for help and assistance in case you are stuck in the troubleshooting process.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how you can troubleshoot problems in Panther and how to locate additional help resources using Sherlock. These tasks introduce troubleshooting applications, such as the Disk Utility, Activity Monitor, and System Profiler, and discuss how you can use them to both monitor your system and fix many hardware and software errors. You will also find a number of Panther’s more common features for dealing with problems: For example, this chapter covers how to update Mac OS X, force a misbehaving application to quit, and boot from a CD-ROM.