Guides & How-Tos

Some users power up their Macs to find they are re-living the year of the first moon landing, with the date and time setting reverting to Dec. 31st, 1969. The problem can be temporarily resolved by simply using the Date and Time System Preference pane to correct this setting, but the erroneous date/time may return the next time the system is restarted, causing significant issues with file creation dates, some date-reliant applications and more.

This problem generally has three causes, which can manifest singly or in tandem:

Old e-mail messages are usually among the neglected components of a healthy backup routine. Despite their general tendency to contain sensitive, important information, and the utility they can serve when searching for old contacts or other data, many users fail to properly preserve previously viewed or sent messages.

In addition, having too many messages in your Mail.app database can cause significant performance issues, both when refreshing the entire list of messages, as well as when performing routine searches of recent items, or even launching and operating within Mail.app.

Here are a few simple solutions for quickly backing up … Read more

Originally posted August 2nd

Dan Frakes July 2005

Our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes, covers products that can help you maintain and fix your Mac.

For the most part, you work with your files in Mac OS X, not on them. But there are times, especially during troubleshooting, when instead of editing the contents of files, you need to change file settings: permissions, file types, extensions, or even obscure attributes such as visibility. There may also be times when you want to manipulate files -- move them, rename them, and so on -- in … Read more

Posted Monday, July 11th

Ted Landau July 2005

One of the great improvements in Mac OS X, as compared to Mac OS and its predecessors, is its superior resistance to disk structure damage. In the "old days," Mac users typically found it necessary to run repair software every few weeks or so -- or risk the arrival of an assortment of irritating symptoms. With Mac OS X, running repair software on a maintenance preventative basis is almost superfluous. Yes, I have had a few occasions when I benefited from First Aid, the repair component built-in to Mac OS … Read more

For various reasons, applications originally installed by the Mac OS X Installer disc (DVD or CD) -- Mail.app, Activity Viewer, etc. -- can become unusable. This can occur due to user deletion, corruption of drive sectors, and other problems. Unfortunately, some of these applications are not available as standalone downloads.

However, virtually all of these applications can be restored with the use of a shareware utility called Pacifist, which will extract the application file(s) in question from the various .pkg containers on the Mac OS X installer disc and put them back in the proper location on your … Read more

Our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes, covers products that can help you maintain and fix your Mac.

There are times when you, as a troubleshooter, may need to modify files that aren't owned by you -- most frequently when the files you want to work with are owned by the OS itself ("system" or the "root" user). For example, perhaps you've found, by reading a site such as MacFixIt or by being told by someone a bit more savvy than you, that editing … Read more

Ted Landau June 2005

In last month's column, I began a look at some of the "smaller" troubleshooting-related changes in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), focusing on changes to the "unexpectedly quit" dialog. This month, I explore several other troubleshooting enhancements to Tiger.

Safe Boots. Apple introduced the Safe Boot in Panther. Essentially, holding down the Shift key immediately after hearing the chimes at startup in Panther resulted in two separate actions: (1) a disk repair check was done -- as would otherwise require selecting "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility's First … Read more

Dan Frakes May 2005

Our monthly Troubleshooting Tools column, penned by MacFixIt Contributing Editor Dan Frakes, covers products that can help you maintain -- and, if necessary, fix -- your Mac.

One of the most serious problems that can afflict your Mac is "bad memory" -- the common term for a defective RAM chip. Although the vast majority of RAM modules work perfectly, making RAM troubles a rare malady, it can be quite frustrating when you're one of the unlucky ones. At the worst, bad RAM can prevent your Mac from even starting up. But it … Read more

Ted Landau May 2005

[Note: This is the first of a few columns where I explore the "smaller" changes in Mac OS X 10.4. These are changes that, while they may not get much publicity, are quite relevant for troubleshooting.]

Among the many new features in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), there is one that Apple has never mentioned its marketing material. Probably, this is because it has to do with a topic that Apple rarely talks about anyway: application crashes. I'm talking about those times when the "unexpectedly quit" dialog appears on … Read more