Grouchy Mac? Don't panic!

This is for the Mac that boots up successfully but acts weird after that.

Every Mac gets weird once in while. But when it happens don't freak out. Applications not opening, the spinning beach ball, sudden loss of your otherwise stable internet connections, or an application just bounces away on the dock and never opens up are usually things that can be fixed easily.

First thing to do... restart. Doing nothing more than restarting will solve 80% of the "all of a sudden my Mac is acting weird" problems. Unlike a PC, restarting your Mac can work magic. I never shut down my desktop computer, and rarely shut down my laptops, preferring to have them sleep so I can wake them up and go to work... this is good, but allowing the computer to restart and reload the OS can sometimes fix little bugs that seem to creep in if your Mac has not been restarted for awhile.

If your Mac doesn't seem to be responding to the command to shut down or restart (which is located under the Apple in the menu bar at the top left of your screen) then you can hold down the power button for 2-3 seconds and it will force your Mac to shut down (this works for all Macs, desktops, laptops, cubes and mini's... both Intel and PPC.) Wait 10 or 15 seconds and then hit the power button and your Mac will start back up.

If you restart and things are still not behaving the way they should, get to your "Applications" folder and then open up your "Utilities" folder. Find the application called "Disk Utility" and double click it. You should select your main hard drive on the column on the left and then select the "First Aid" tab on the right. Then click on "Repair Disk Permissions" towards the bottom of the window.

After the computer completes this (and it might take awhile so don't worry if it seems to be going very slowly) click the "Verify Disk Permissions" button and you should not see repeats of any of the errors that the computer found and hopefully fixed when you told it to "repair."

If there are still errors (usually in red) that Disk Utility couldn't fix, copy the name of the error and do a Google search on the name of the error and put "os x" after it and if it is common, you should be able to find the fix for whatever the problem is.

Something else to consider when problems start appearing... have you added any software, hardware, memory or anything else to the computer right before the problem started? If so, try uninstalling or unplugging that latest addition to see if the problem goes away.

If repairing permissions doesn't solve the problem consider Onyx made by Titanium Software, a tool no wise Mac user will be without. It is free but one of the best all around utility programs to fix your ailing Mac. If your problems aren't solved by the fixes above, you should definitely try Onyx. When you open Onyx it will want to verify S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drive and verify the startup volume (which will quit all other applications running on your machine) You do not want to skip this steps. It can alert you to problems and let you know if your problem could be hard drive related instead of software related.

If Onyx tells you that there are issues with the disk and it needs to be repaired, you should restart your computer and boot from your install DVD for whichever OS you are using (10.4 or 10.5) and run the disk utility when booted from the DVD to repair the drive.

Disk Utility can't repair a drive when it is the drive you are running your Mac from, so you have to start from another drive (or DVD) to fix your main hard drive. Here are the instructions on how to do it.

Once your disk is repaired, you can restart like normal and there is a good chance your problem is fixed. Disk errors can cause all sorts of glitches.

If not, reopen Onyx and go to the "Automation" tab, click all the check boxes...yes, everything and then click "Execute."

Doing this is sort of the computer version of the broad spectrum antibiotic. It will clean and zap all sorts of stuff in your system (non-destructive to your data) that can become corrupt and hopefully you will have a happy Mac after that.

If you are still having problems with specific applications (not with the system as a whole) check to see if there are any updates for the program. Many apps now have the ability to check for updates automatically when you start them up, but either way, go to the software maker's site and look for any updates or look in their support area to see if there are fixes for your specific problem.

You can also do a Google search for the name of the application and a description of the problem and add "OS X" to the end for good measure. Something like "Photoshop CS3 crop tool broken OS X" (the problem I am having that I posted about previously.) The other good reason to do this is because it is rare that you are the only person experiencing whatever problem that is occurring. By doing a search, you will find out that you aren't alone and hopefully stumble upon a fix along the way.

If your problem is with a specific application, the next thing to try would be deleting and reinstalling that piece of software to see if that makes things better. The way I like to do this is with AppZapper. It cleanly gets rid of the application and the support files and preferences. It also makes a cool Captain Kirk "Zap" phaser noise as it sends your no-longer-needed app to the trash. As cool as AppZapper is, however, you still have to reinstall the software the old fashioned way... it's only good at getting rid of apps, not reinstalling them.

If problems continue and repairing permissions, cleaning things out using Onyx, searching for the problem you are having yielded no results, and reinstalling the offending software didn't help, I would try doing a clean install of your system and reinstall everything. (Or just restore your computer from your backups... you backup, right??)

While reinstalling everything can be time consuming, in the long run it will usually save you some time. I can have all my critical software reinstalled on a computer in about three hours when I reinstall from the disks... yet troubleshooting obscure problems can consume the best Mac sleuths for days. After doing the steps above, you are usually better off just starting over then remaining in a semi-crippled mode with your computer and hoping and firing blindly for a fix.

If you are absolutely opposed to doing a clean reinstall, the other thing to try would be taking your offending Mac to the Apple Store or give Apple support a call place to see what they can do. If you take it to the Apple Store and they decide there is a problem and that they want to take in your computer for repair, make sure you have all your data backed up... they are fond of wiping hard drives and doing clean OS installs... and for good reason.

The only other thing to consider... there are times where bad RAM or other hardware issues can cause what seem like random corruption, and if this is the case with your Mac, it's probably best left to Apple to help you ferret out where that problem lies.

Installing Leopard... a tale of two installs

One really important thing I forgot to mention about Leopard: DO A CLEAN INSTALL.

But before you do anything... do a complete bootable backup of your hard drive. Please! I beg you! Doing OS upgrades on a computer is the way to guarantee something will go horribly wrong if you aren't backed up. So go to your local computer store, Apple Store, or your favorite online retailer (my favorite for Mac stuff is Other World Computing) and buy yourself an external drive to back everything up first. You will be glad you did.

The first machine I installed it on, my MacBook, didn't take to it too well when I did the install as an update. In fact, my poor little MacBook didn't do well at all. It got slow, buggy, things crashed, it had problems booting, problems shutting down and was not much fun to use. You would be in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden the fans would come on and the Activity Monitor would show all of these strange (meaning not the normal processor intensive things going on behind the scenes) processes running at nearly 100% of the laptop's capacity.

So after a couple of hours of trying to track down what caused all these issues (although deep down I knew it was because I tried running the update) I then heeded the advice of Apple and did a clean install... and it worked great.

At times, I don't learn lessons easily, however. So my next Leopard target was the Mac Mini in our family room that is used by my wife for surfing, my son for playing Lego Star Wars and Wingnuts and my inlaws for watching Korean soap operas while they are hanging out with the twins. So what did I do, why I tried running the upgrade again on the Mini.

How did it work?

Horribly! I had everyone mad at me because it actually seemed (to me) to work pretty well after it had finished. Now I don't use the Mini much, unless it requires some sort of fix, so I guess I didn't spend that much time checking everything out, but I probably should have. Safari started crashing, Nick (my Lego Star Wars loving son) was unhappy because the games wouldn't load and my inlaws couldn't get any of the online videos to play. Lets just say my family was not seeing the value of upgrading to Leopard.

So again, I got the various install disks out and did a clean install and it worked great. No problems whatsoever.

Now I have to confess, in the past, I have gotten away with doing upgrades (I did 10.3 to 10.4 upgrade on my 15" Powerbook in a hotel room in Ohio somewhere after a shoot) and then came home and did the same for all my other Macs and it worked fine... that time. But Leopard seems to introduce enough new stuff that upgrading can cause more problems than just spending an hour or two and starting fresh.

The other good reason to do clean installs is because it gives you a chance to do some spring cleaning on your computer. You actually look at how much junk you have installed on your computer vs. what you actually use all the time.

Some people that are too scared to wipe their hard drive (or maybe they just like living dangerously and are opposed to backing up ) like the archive and install choice. That is where it moves everything on your computer into a folder called "Old System" or something like that and installs the new system in a new system folder. The reason I don't like this is because it leaves all your applications alone and there are a number of apps that put stuff in other places (that is now called "Old System" ) and so the temptation is to start using the stuff in the old system instead of reinstalling your apps, too. Take this as a fact... if you try to use your apps from the previous install, you will spend more time trying to figure out why they aren't working right than if you had just installed them cleanly in the new system.

After doing the clean install, this is when you can go to your backup of the drive to import thing like your email, preferences and other odds and ends that you are going to need on the new system after you installed all your apps.

Another thing that I would suggest before doing the upgrade is make sure you have all of your downloaded installers, installers on CD's or DVD's and most importantly, serial numbers for everything before you do the reinstall. I actually print out a copy of what is in my applications folder so that when I do the reinstall I don't forget anything important. I actually create a folder with the latest drivers and installers when I did my upgrades on all the machines so I could just work down the list in the folder installing one after another which saves time of having to hunt for disks and downloads later on.

I would also suggest doing a Google search to make sure that all your critical applications and hardware (printers, scanners, etc.) are working with Leopard. In Google just search for the name of the hardware and "leopard" or "10.5" or search for it both ways. You can also include words like "issue, "problem", or "conflict" to see if anything comes up.

If it turns out that your printer or some other hardware is not Leopard compatible, look at the bright side... you really do deserve some new peripherals, don't you???