Preventing Problems (The Macintosh Bible) Ch. 7

Note: What follows is the complete text of Chapter 7 of the sixth edition of the Macintosh Bible. Only the figures have been omitted - so as to allow the page to load faster. The contents are copyrighted by Peachpit Press and may not be sold or distributed.

If you are in a panic because your hard drive seems to have died or because your favorite application won't open or because your cursor has frozen solid or because a message appeared on your screen that said you had a Type 11 error, here is where you'll learn how get your Mac running smoothly again. Solving these types of problems is what this chapter is all about. So welcome to the least fun chapter in this book. It's the stuff you need to know so that you can have fun the rest of the time.

And make no mistake about it: You will have problems using your Mac. This is a given. Whether you are a novice user running a new Mac straight out of the box or a seasoned pro running a top-of-the-line Mac that has been modified, expanded and customized more times than a car buff's '57 Chevy, you will have problems.

The best way to solve problems is to avoid them. That's why the first aim of this chapter is to prescribe some preventive medicine-helpful hints on how to stop problems before they happen. Next, we review the tools of the trade, those software utilities that you'll need to make your problem solving as painless as possible. Finally, we present a survey of the most common maladies you will face and what to do to cure them.

Part 1

Part 2

Preventive Medicine for Hardware (LL)

Hardware precautions tend to be simple and painless-and definitely worth doing. The problems they prevent are ones that could otherwise be fatal to your Mac.

Your Setup Makes a Difference

How you set up your Mac can prevent unnecessary hardware problems from occurring and provide prolonged, efficient use of your Macintosh computer. Your setup includes where your Mac is located, as well as the location of all its hardware peripherals.

Surge protectors (a power strip with a buffer to protect your equipment if the voltage suddenly changes) are an essential part of a computer system. Plugging all of your computer components into a surge protector can protect your hardware from unnecessary or unexpected power surges or electrical damage from lightning or local power source. During storms, to be extra safe, unplug your computer equipment altogether. [If you are going to get a surge protector, spend the extra bucks to get a good one. In general, any surge protector that costs less than $20 is not really offering the protection you should expect. Figure on spending $40 or more. -TL]

Be sure your Mac setup is away from extreme heat, cold, water, or unstable environments. All of these elements can permanently damage your Mac's internal components. Place your Mac, peripherals, monitor, and keyboard on a table with a strong base, and on a stable, flat floor. Try to keep the computer away from high-traffic areas to minimize having things or people bumping into your computer, or jarring the table. You may also want to consider adding your computer and related equipment to your home insurance policy.

Macs, like other computer hardware and electrical components, are not made to be water or static friendly. Put your Mac in a location furthest from water, moisture, mildew, or steam. Water on your Mac or peripherals can create an electrical short on your motherboard, which can be a costly replacement.

The most common source of static in a home or office is a carpet. Moving your feet across a carpet can generate enough of a static shock, so that you could damage your Mac's mircocircuit components just by touching them. That's why, before opening your Mac's case or any other hardware product casing, you should ideally be in a static-free area and grounded. Professionals use grounding straps to do this. However, in most cases, it will be sufficient to discharge your static electricity by touching a piece of metal (such as the casing of the Mac's power supply) before working with any other components.

Be sure to keep your Mac, and its monitor, at least a few feet away from other magnetic sources, such as a stereo speaker, television, telephone or power line. Magnetic sources can affect the consistency of your screen display, video input or output quality or audio input and playback quality.

Try to avoid dust build-up on the outside and inside of your Macintosh. Keep your Mac in a well-ventilated area, leaving at least a few inches around the ventilation slits on the case open so air circulation is not hampered and to avoid over-heating the internal hardware pieces in your Mac. Dust build-up on your Mac's logic board (the main component board inside your Mac) can cause your Mac to have slightly slower performance, and can also be a factor in overheating a chip or solder on your motherboard.

If you do not use your computer frequently, or if you have to unavoidably locate it in an overly dusty, windy or congested environment, consider purchasing a plastic cover for the Mac (use only when it is not on) and the keyboard to protect it from unnecessary exposure to computer-unfriendly environmental elements.

When To Save Energy

For desktop Macs or PowerBooks, you can leave your Macintosh turned off if it is not used daily. If you plan on using the Mac over several days, leave it on until you and other users have completed work. Then shut if off until you plan on using it again. If you use your Mac daily, it's recommended to leave your Mac on all the time. With the possible exception of the monitor, most experts concur that frequently turning your equipment on and off shortens the life of its electrical components.

PCI Power Macintoshes and PowerBooks have a sleep feature, which puts your Mac in low-power mode until you press the space bar. You can put your Mac to sleep automatically by adjusting settings in the PowerBook control panel or (with desktop systems) the Energy Saver control panel. Sleep mode allows you to bypass the startup process which occurs when you power up your Mac from the keyboard or switch on your Mac's case. Any applications open before Sleep mode begins remain open when your Mac awakes from sleep. Sleep mode is recommended if you use your Mac daily and wish to preserve the longevity of your Mac hardware.

For most other Macs, Apple has one of a myriad of Energy Saver control panels that at least put the monitor to "sleep." Screen saver utilities, such as After Dark (see Chapter 13), remain another popular way of doing this. However, most monitors available today don't require a screen saver since they are energy saver-aware and will power down if not in use for a pre-determined amount of time. Screen savers are not harmful, though, and can be fun to watch. [With newer monitors, screen savers are also no longer needed to protect against burn-in (where a monitor develops a permanent "ghost" of an image that was left on the screen for too long).-TL]

Before Moving Your Hardware

Before moving your Mac or any peripherals, always turn off the power and disconnect power cables from the electrical power source (from the wall, or surge protector). Doing this reduces the possibility of static electricity-induced damage, and data corruption due to electrical, hardware or software errors caused by moving hardware while the computer is on. While your computer is powered on, never disconnect or move hardware peripherals or internals as this can possibly damage your equipment or affect the efficiency of the device if it has moving parts (such as a hard drive).

[The same goes for Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) cables. Even though the cables that go to your mouse and keyboard carry only a small amount of power, unplugging one can blow a fuse on some Mac logic boards. I know-I fried a Mac II (at the beginning of one of the busiest weeks of the year for me) by disconnecting a keyboard.-HN]

[On the other hand, I connect and disconnect devices attached to my serial ports (printers and modems) all the time and have never had a problem.-TL]

Before moving or disconnecting cables, follow each cable connection visually or physically in order to avoid selecting the wrong cable (i.e. the cable to another Mac or computer). Disconnect and move cabling slowly to avoid damaging the pins inside the cable, as well as other clips or cables surrounding it.

If you are adding a new hardware product to your Mac configuration, make sure all hardware/cabling and connection pieces are present before disconnecting or moving existing hardware. Be sure you have cables with the correct length, and ample room on your table for housing the hardware before attempting installation.

Preventive Medicine for Software

Whenever something on a Mac fails to work, too many users immediately assume that the hardware is at fault. If a system crash occurs twice in one day, they are already packing up their Mac to take it to the repair shop. Happily, this is rarely needed. Most Mac problems are software-based. Many of them can be easily prevented by following the prescriptions in this section. And most other problems can be fixed by the software cures described in the remaining sections of this chapter.

Get Those Updates

The vast majority of the freezes, crashes, and other types of failures you are likely to have are ultimately due to software bugs. The bug may be in the application you are using, a third-party extension, or some component of the system software. It may even be some mysterious combination of these causes.

Whatever the ultimate source of the bug, you cannot fix it. Let me repeat: you cannot eliminate a bug yourself. That is a task for the people who wrote the software. However, what you can do is find out if a bug-fixed version of the software is already available (and if not, when it will be) and what work-around solutions may be possible while you are waiting for the upgrade to arrive. Here's how:

Check out the packaging that comes with your software. It should describe the minimum requirements to use it. Pay attention. There's no point in buying software that only runs on a Power Mac if you are still using a Mac II. While this sort of incompatibility is technically not a "bug" (that is, it isn't something wrong with the software that needs to be fixed), it amounts to the same thing for you: without the right hardware you won't be able to use the software.

Similarly, check out any Read Me file that comes on the program disk or that is installed when you install the software on your hard drive. You will likely learn about such things as specific extension conflicts, known bugs that have not been fixed in the current version of the program, and special circumstances where the program may be incompatible with Apple's system software.

Macintosh magazines, such as MacUser and Macworld, also routinely report known bugs and compatibility problems.

Send back the registration card that came with your product. That way, when a bug-fixed upgrade comes out, the company will typically notify you about it. They may even send it to you for free!

Get online. If a bug-fixed upgrade is free (and many are), the company is almost certain to post the upgrade on some online service. Your best bet these days is to find the Web site (see Chapter 23) of the company (every company has one now, trust me) and check it out. There are also numerous online Web sites devoted to listing conflicts and bugs. One of the best is the Complete Conflict Compendium.

If you have a problem with a specific program and you are in desperate need of immediate help, call the vendor's technical support line. You'll find the number somewhere in the documentation that came with your software. For Apple, it's 1-800-SOS-APPL.

If you are not in a panic for an immediate answer (which may not be so immediate anyway, as many technical support lines are notorious for keeping you on hold indefinitely), your software's documentation probably lists online locations where you can leave messages or check for technical support tips. User-supported Mac forums and newsgroups are also a good place to leave requests for help (see Chapters 22 and 23 for more on this).

Does all of this seem too time-consuming? Does it seem like keeping up with all of this can be a full-time job in itself? Of course it does. That's because it is. Nobody really does all of these things all of the time. Well, okay, I do, but I write about the Macintosh for a living. Just do what you have the time for. Whatever effort you expend, it will rarely be wasted.

Speaking of myself, I would be remiss if I did not recommend my own troubleshooting book, Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters ($35, Addision-Wesley) for those times when you want more help.

Managing Your Memory (TL/HN)

Shortages of memory are one of the biggest sources of instability on the Mac: the less free RAM available, the greater the risk of a crash or freeze. And that rule holds for individual applications as well as the whole system: Each program you launch gets a certain memory allocation or partition, and if you fill that up, you could have problems even if there's plenty of memory lying idle on your system-the Mac doesn't normally redistribute memory dynamically among open applications.

Developers don't want their products perceived as memory hogs, so they tend to set the Minimum and Preferred memory amounts (the data the system uses to allocate memory to a program when you launch it) to levels that may be too low for real-life usage. You can give your programs a safety cushion by increasing these amounts: Simply go to the Finder, select the program's icon (when it's not running) and press Command-I or select Get Info from the File menu. Under current versions of the system software, you can change Preferred and Minimum values. Hit e or just close the Get Info window, and the new numbers will be saved and used the next time you launch the program. There are also several programs, included AppSizer (shareware, Pierce Software), that let you make these adjustments at launch, bypassing the need to go to the Get Info window.

For more specific advice regarding memory management problems, see "Not Enough Memory" later in this chapter.

Save Your Work

If you learn nothing else from this chapter, learn this: With depressingly few exceptions, if you get a system freeze or crash while you are working on a document, any unsaved changes you made to the document are lost-forever! So remember to press the Command-S keys whenever you pause for a moment. The few seconds it takes to save your document can save you hours of frustration down the road.

Back Up Your Work

Even if you saved a document, danger still lurks. A file could become hopelessly corrupted or a hard disk crash could wipe out the entire contents of your disk (don't get too alarmed; this happens only rarely, but it does happen). To prevent thoughts of suicide at such times, make sure all of your data are backed up to some other location.

These days the most popular choice of backup medium are removable cartridges, such as Iomega's Zip drive and SyQuests' EZ135. Removable cartridges are as convenient as floppy disks but hold many times more information (from 100MB to over a gigabyte, depending upon which model you get). And the least expensive models are relatively cheap (less than $200), which is very important because users are generally resistant to spending their hard-earned cash on something as unglamorous as a backup device. Resist this resistance and get a backup device. Otherwise, it's like saving money by getting a car that doesn't include an airbag in the hopes that you never have an accident. It isn't worth the risk (see Chapter 6).

The Finder is great for making frequent backups of a few critical documents, but for full disk backups you'll want a more heavy-duty program, such as Retrospect (see "Troubleshooting Tools" later in this chapter).

[If you have some disk space to spare, it's a good idea to keep an extra, up-to-date copy of your System and Finder (or even your whole System Folder) on-line-if your main system gets corrupted, switching to this backup is easier than doing a complete reinstall. But compress the backup with a utility such as StuffIt, DiskDoubler, or Compact Pro; that way, there's no danger that it could be confused for the active system, and it won't take up so much space. (If your original system software gets badly damaged, boot from a floppy, decompress the backup, throw away the damaged original files, and reboot.)-HN]

Have Emergency Startup Disks Ready (TL/HN)

Right after your hard drive has crashed and your Mac won't start up is not the best time to discover that you don't have an emergency startup disk handy. Right now is the best time to prepare a set of startup disks.

If you got a set of Apple floppy disks with your machine, you can always use the original Disk Tools disk as your emergency disk. Better yet, prepare your own emergency disk. First make a copy of the Disk Tools disk using a utility such as Apple's Disk Copy (which is now included on the CD-ROM that comes with most Macs). Make sure it's the Disk Tools disk that came with your Mac or it may not work with your Mac. Alternatively, if you have a CD-ROM that came with your computer, there should be a file on it called Disk Tools.image. Double-click it and it will open Disk Copy. Now all you have to do is insert a fresh floppy disk and you are ready to make a copy. Once you have the copy made, you can add one or two small utilities to it or delete existing files from it to make room for other files. You can do this to make as many emergency disks as you need. Finally, slide the tab to lock the disk and test it to see if it really works as a startup disk.

Alternatively, if your Mac came with a CD-ROM drive, remember that the CD-ROM that came with your Mac can act as a startup disc itself! It already contains Disk First Aid, Drive Setup (or Apple HD SC Setup), and a complete set of Installation disk files. Even better, when booting from the CD-ROM, you can still insert a floppy disk for access to additional software.

To start up with these special CD-ROMs in an internal CD-ROM drive: insert the disc, select Restart and hold down the C key until you see the Welcome to Macintosh message. If you have an external CD-ROM drive, press the Command-Option-Shift-Delete keys at startup. This should bypass the internal hard disk so that you boot from the CD.

If you have a second hard drive (especially a removable cartridge drive) you can set it up as a alternative startup disk. The advantage here is that there is no worry about fitting everything you want on to the disk. You select which disk to start up from by using the Startup Disk control panel (or to simply bypass the internal drive, press Command-Option-Shift-Delete at startup).

Your emergency tool set should at least include: a disk-formatting utility, a utility that can check the status of all of your SCSI devices (such as SCSI Probe), and a data recovery/repair utility (such as Norton Utilities). Check out the next section ("Troubleshooting Tools") for more details. You should also have handy the floppy or CD-ROM disks that came with your Mac (as well as the disks you used the last time you upgraded to a new system version). You'll need these to do a clean reinstall of your system software.

Know Your System (HN/TL)

If and when you ever call a vendor's tecnhical support, they will almost certainly ask you about the details of your Mac configuration, including both hardware issues (model number, processor speed, total memory, installed cards, etc.) and software particulars (system version, names and version numbers of the applications you use, the extensions and control panels you have installed, etc.). If you don't have this information handy, get it and print it out now, before your Mac goes down and you can't get at it. Fortunately, there are utilities that make collecting these data a breeze to do. If you own Now Utilities (described in Chapter 13), use Now Profiler. More limited, but still useful, is a new utility from Apple (included with System 7.5.3) called Apple System Profiler. A variety of other shareware and commercial alternatives exist.

Troubleshooting Tools (RS)

When it comes to troubleshooting your Mac, some of the best help you can get comes in the form of troubleshooting utilities. Here's a short list of the cream of the crop (more information of some of these can be found in Chapter 13).

Tools to Try First

Before you run out and purchase an expensive software diagnostic package to try to cure your Mac's problem, possibly save yourself some bucks and first try these free or inexpensive shareware tools (available from user groups or from online services).

TechTool is a freeware utility (from MicroMat) that every Macintosh owner should have. TechTool rebuilds your desktop from scratch, eliminating problems with desktop files that are so corrupted that they cannot be rebuilt in the normal fashion. TechTool also zaps the PRAM (see "Zapping the PRAM" later in this chapter) in a more thorough way than Apple's standard method. It also allows you to save and restore your current PRAM settings so that you don't have to go back and do it manually. The most recent versions of TechTool also tests for damaged System files.[And it does this all without you having to remember any special keyboard combination shortcuts-TL].

This essential freeware control panel scans your SCSI bus, provides name and SCSI ID information on attached SCSI devices, and allows you to mount devices that did not show up (or were not present) at startup. Several other utilities can do this just as well, but SCSIProbe set the standard.

Insider Software's Font Box ($30) is a shareware diagnostic utility that solves many of the mysteries of font management. It checks for corrupted fonts, font ID conflicts, incorrectly installed fonts and more. A similar utility, though not shareware anymore, is the theFONDler ($70, Rascal Software).

Problems with a file's BNDL resource can lead to incorrect icons in the Finder. Rebuilding the desktop often, but not always, fixes these problems. For problems with one or two specific files, a faster and more reliable method is to use the freeware Save a BNDL utility. Just drag and drop the problem file to the Save a BNDL icon, restart, and you are done.

Wondering what a particular extension does, whether it runs on your machine or if you can afford to trash it? Get Dan Frakes' InformInit.

Extension Managers

Extensions managers are an invaluable aid in tracking down extension conflicts (see "Solving Extension Conflicts" later in this chapter). You can use them to selectively turn on and off individual extensions, reorder the loading sequence, and even perform tests to identify a problem extension. Apple includes its own version of this type of utility named, aptly enough, Extension Manager. It lacks many of the features of its competitors, but at least it is free. The two best known of the commercial bunch are Startup Manager ($90, part of Now Utilities) and Conflict Catcher 3 ($100, Casady & Greene). Conflict Catcher is the class leader here. One of the coolest things that only Conflict Catcher can do is to have extensions and control panels display their names, rather than just their icons, as they dance across the screen at startup. (For more details on utilities, see Chapter 13: "Utilities").

Data Recovery Tools/Hard Drive Repair

You may not need a repair utility often, but when you do need one, it is a lifesaver. The field of commercial hard drive repair packages has narrowed down to two: Norton Utilities for Macintosh ($150, Symantec) and MacTools Pro ($150, also from Symantec via its Central Point division). Each one has devoted fans that swear by it. The truth is that each can do some things better than the other, but the debate as to which one is best may soon be moot. The folks at Symantec say that the two will eventually be merged into one product. [I have always liked MacTools Pro better, although I use both. I especially like MacTools' TrashBack extension for recovering accidentally deleted files. No other program does it better (as long as TrashBack doesn't cause an extension conflict). Unfortunately, Symantec has now discontined MacTools.-TL]

Norton Utilities and MacTools Pro are collections of utilities that include hard drive diagnostic and repair software (their premiere function), hard drive defragmenters (utilities that combine the fragmented segments of a program as it is stored on a disk and combine them into a single segment, supposedly leading to improved performance of your drive), utilities that recover files which have accidentally been deleted or otherwise lost, and a host of other features. But no matter how good these programs are, don't use them as a substitute for backing up the contents of your disk!

[Norton Utilities and MacTools Pro both come with an emergency startup disk. If it fails to run on your Mac (typically because it is missing a needed machine-specific enabler file or needs a more recent version of the system software), these programs also include a special feature for creating customized startup disks. MacTools Pro can even create a startup RAM disk (a portion of RAM that the Mac is fooled into thinking is a physical disk), if you have enough RAM available. If none of this seems to work, contact the software's technical support for additional advice.-TL]

Even if you choose not to buy one of the commercial data recovery packages, you still have an important repair utility at your disposal: Apple's Disk First Aid. It comes with all versions of the system software (it's on the Disk Tools disk). It is more limited in what it can do. In particular, there are several problems that Disk First Aid can identify, but which it cannot repair. For that you will need either Norton Utilities or MacTools Pro. But it's fast, free, easy to use, and Apple regularly updates it.

For files that cannot open because they appear to be corrupted in some way, your best defense is CanOpener ($65, Abbott Systems, Inc.). If there's a way to recover corrupted text, graphics, sounds or movies, CanOpener will find it.

Backup Utilities

When you finally realize you need something more than the Finder for backing up your files, it's time for a specialized backup utility. Retrospect ($50 and up, Dantz Development) is the premier package for business and use on networks. It is scriptable, works with just about any storage medium, and includes compression. Retrospect Remote includes client software for network nodes. Other worthwhile alternatives for personal use include DiskFit ($50 and up, Dantz Development) and Redux Deluxe ($80, Focus Enhancements). Norton Utilities and MacTools Pro also both include backup utilities as part of their software suite. (See Chapter 13 for more details on backup utilities.)

Disk Formatting Utilities (RS/TL)

While basic information about disk formatting utilities is covered in Chapter 5, be aware that these are useful troubleshooting tools. Most notably, they are used to replace or update the driver software on your hard drive. A corrupted or out-of-date driver can cause a host of problems, including system crashes and the inability to even start up your Mac. Since updating the driver is a simple and painless procedure, it is almost always worth a try. They can also test the media of your hard drive for defects. If a defect is found, they can lock out that defective area so that it isn't used. Using these utilities to actually reformat your disk (after you've backed it up first!) may solve problems that nothing else can seem to fix. But save this radical surgery as a last resort.

For drives that come directly from Apple, the formatting utility is either Drive Setup (for Power Macs and for Macs that have IDE drives) or Apple HD SC Setup (for all other Macs). Other drive manufacturers typically ship with their own formatting utilities that work only with their drives. A few utilities such as Drive7 ($90, Casa Blanca Works) and Hard Disk ToolKit ($199, FWB) are designed to work with virtually any drive. This makes them especially useful for Macs that use several drives from different manufacturers. Using the same universal driver on all your drives can eliminate problems all by itself.

Anti-Virus Utilities (RS/TL)

To check for a possible virus invasion, you need an anti-virus utility. The three most well known are Disinfectant (freeware), Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh ($100, Symantec)) and Virex ($100, Datawatch). The latter two do the better job of proactively preventing a virus infection (such as preventing an infected floppy disk from even mounting on your desktop). [However, this checking can slow down your Mac or otherwise cause conflicts with other software. Personally, I don't use this feature any more. The threat of a virus is too small to compensate for the downside of using it-HN] All three are equally fine at detecting and eradicating existing infections, as long as you make sure you regularly update the programs (the latest version of Disinfectant and the latest update files for SAM and Virex are available free online). Out-of-date versions will be unable to recognize newly discovered viruses.

Despite their publicity, viruses are not a common threat on computers, especially on a Macintosh. There are only about 36 viruses that infect Macs (compared to well over 100 for IBM-compatibles) and few of them are intentionally malicious (though they all can cause operating problems or data loss). Still, it is a good idea to periodically scan for viruses, especially so if your Mac develops symptoms that suggest an infection (all the anti-virus utilities describe what these symptoms are). Be especially wary if you copy files from public computers (such as in schools and universities) or from unmonitored sites on the Internet [I downloaded an infected file from the Internet while working on this chapter!-TL] In contrast, the chance of getting a virus from commercial online services is quite low, as these files are always checked for viruses before they are made available.

A plus for Virex (version 5.6 or later) is that it can automatically scan files as they are downloaded.

Hardware/Software Diagnostics

This class of software tests the performance of your Mac and points out problems or impending problems. They have no ability to repair any problems they find [and if your problem is so severe that you can't start up your Mac, these programs are useless-TL]. I would not really recommend most of the programs for ordinary users, except in special circumstances (such as trying to track down an existing problem that would be expensive to have a technician look at) or if they are particularly paranoid. These utilities are extremely useful for a system administrator or a shop technician.

Help! ($50, Teknosys) is primarily a huge database with thousands of rules that define the specific requirements for an impressive variety of Mac software. This database is kept up to date via a paid subscription updater service. The program looks at your Macintosh system and then gives you a report about such things as damaged files, incompatible programs and extensions, and improperly installed or configured software. Look for a union between Help! and Peace of Mind (described next) in the near future.

Peace of Mind ($100, Diagsoft) and MacEKG ($150, MicroMat) both perform a series of diagnostic tests that check the performance and integrity of your Mac's hardware. They test the CPU, memory, hard and floppy disks, keyboard, mouse or trackball, system clock, sound capabilities, ROM, PRAM, modem, printer, and add-in cards.

I recommend Peace of Mind over MacEKG, assuming Peace of Mind has been upgraded to work with the latest Power Mac CPUs by the time you read this. MacEKG just isn't as comprehensive, although its interface is way cool!

[However, MicroMat has now released TechTool Pro ($150). While the MacEKG control panel conducts brief tests at startup as a means of detecting changes in performance that could signal some problem, TechTool Pro is an application that is best used to check for specific suspected problems or to conduct a much wider range of tests. Integrating and extending features from TechTool (the freeware version), MacEKG, and DriveTech (MicroMat's floppy disk diagnostic software), TechTool Pro checks just about every imaginable aspect of your hardware (as well as a few aspects you probably never imagined!)-TL]

Apple's diagnostic utility, Apple Personal Diagnostics ($99), hasn't been updated since August of 1995 and only covers Macintosh models up to and including the Power Macintosh 9500. The development team for this product no longer exists and word is that the program is up for sale to another publisher.

The Macintosh Bible

(6th Edition)

Chapter 7 - Part 1

Preventing and Solving Problems

Contents