The causes of the problems you experience will be oneor a combinationof five general types of problems:
Each of these problems is detailed in the sections that follow. User ErrorThe results of many investigations into aviation accidents can often be summed up with the phrase "pilot error." Similarly, this is often the case with an "accident" in the Mac world. Many problems are the direct result of a user (this means you) doing something improperlyor not doing something properly. Some of the things you might do to cause problems for yourself are the following:
NOTE Proper maintenance includes maintaining good backups of your data, applications, or (even better) your entire system. Using a Mac without a backup system is like playing Russian roulette. Much of the time, you'll be fine. But sometimes you lose, and when you do, you lose big. BugsSometimes the cause of a problem is a bug inherent in the design of the products involved. The bug can be a design flaw, a manufacturing problem, or a conflict with some other part of your system. Although companies often do the best they can to prevent bugs, there is usually no way to prevent all the possible bugs in a product. Many bugs aren't revealed until a piece of software or hardware is combined with some other pieces of hardware or software. Conflicting SoftwareOne of the most common causes of problems is conflicting software. Some programs just don't play well with others. Conflicts are often associated with system-level applications and resources because they modify the low-level operations of the system. However, applications can also conflict with one another and cause you headaches. Because Mac OS X features protected memory, these types of conflicts are much less common under Mac OS X than they were under previous versions of the Mac OS. Because of protected memory, you aren't likely to experience many conflicts between applications. However, there is still the potential for conflict between software that modifies the system and the core OS or software that uses hardware components of your system, such as heavy use of disks. Attacks on Your SystemThe two primary sources of attacks on your system come from the outside: viruses and hackers. Viruses can cause all sorts of problems from simple and silly messages appearing to strange dialog boxes to major system crashes and even data deletions or hard disk failures. Viruses that do serious damage have traditionally been fairly rare on the Mac, but because Mac OS X is based on Unix, it remains to be seen whether viruses will be a more significant source of concern than they have been for Mac users. Fortunately, viruses are among the easier problems to avoid. On the other hand, if you use a broadband connection to the Internet, your Mac will be subjected to all sorts of hackers who want to do damage to you or others. These are definitely the more serious of the two possible sources of attacks. NOTE Although attacks are normally associated with someone from outside your local network, this is not always the case. Sometimes, even unknowingly (such as in an email-based virus attack), users on your local network can wreak havoc on your system. The proper use of user accounts and permissions and a bit of paying attention will go a long way toward preventing incursions on your Mac from a local user.
To learn how to defend yourself against these attacks, p. 1032. Hardware FailuresThe most unlikely cause of problems is a hardware failure. Although hardware does fail now and again, it doesn't happen very often. Hardware failures are most likely to occur immediately after you start using a new piece of hardware or close to the end of its useful life. Sometimes, you can induce a hardware failure when you upgrade a machine or perform some other type of maintenance on itfor example, if you install new RAM in a machine but fail to seat a RAM chip properly. The most common problems associated with hardware devices are actually related to the device drivers that enable the OS to communicate with the device. |