Troubleshooting

Check defaults before altering hidden settings in OS X

OS X applications and services often contain a number of hidden settings that can be used to tweak your Mac's behavior to improve performance or provide an option that is not available by default. To manage these hidden options, you can use the "defaults" terminal command to edit the target preferences file associated with a service and manually adjust a variable's value.

Since the defaults command performs these edits in a single line in the Terminal, it is relatively easy to use and is often suggested as a way to edit property list (plist) files, which … Read more

How to tackle waking a stubbornly sleeping Mac

Sleep modes in OS X are designed to save power by shutting down unnecessary and power-hungry system components; however, there may be times after an update or other configuration change when the system hangs or otherwise malfunctions after being set to sleep.

OS X has two main sleep modes. The first is standard sleep, in which the system keeps the contents of its memory active by providing power only to the RAM chips. This allows quick wake-up times but also draws a touch more power as it requires uninterrupted power to maintain RAM contents. The second mode is hibernation, in … Read more

Power management hot keys in OS X

Many system functions in OS X are accessible not only through menus and utilities, but also through hot keys that can be invoked from the keyboard. Often these can be found by perusing the menus and observing the keyboard shortcuts next to the various commands in them, but in addition to these there are a number of hidden keyboard shortcuts that can be used for managing specific functions.

When it comes to power management options in OS X, such as restarting or shutting down, people often access the Apple menu where Apple keeps these options; however, if your mouse is … Read more

Is Mountain Lion mishandling large drives?

Hard drives are easily surpassing 3TB storage capacities, either individually or when used in RAID arrays, and have become attractive options for external storage on various Mac users, not only for various data libraries (i.e., iTunes and iPhoto), but also for Time Machine backups. However, some people have encountered an apparent bug in which using some drives in Mountain Lion results in partitioning errors and the inability to access data on the drives.

When the problems happen, the drive becomes inaccessible, and when checking with Disk Utility users will see an error that states, "Error: Partition map repair … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions about how to roll back to a previous version of Safari after experiencing compatibility issues with a newer version, how Time Machine manages full backups in multidisk setups, and concerns about both Mail syncing errors and security with e-mail account names being shown. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Rolling back to a previous version of Safari MacFixIt reader Clark … Read more

Bind hot keys to speech services in OS X

As OS X has progressed in development Apple has included more and more speech services options, including enhancing the text-to-speech features with smoother and more realistic voices, and also making this service more globally available to applications. In addition, Apple has provided a dictation service in Mountain Lion to allow conversions of spoken words back to text.

If you use these services, you may find it convenient to create hot-key shortcuts for them. The Dictation service has a default hot-key option, but the Text to Speech option does not, and by default requires you to select a body of text … Read more

Apple tackles latest OS X issues with supplemental updates

Apple has released a supplemental update to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that fixes some outstanding issues that were introduced in or were not addressed by the most recent 10.8.2 update. The fixes include problems with Lion systems taking forever to back up to Time Machine, and a problem in which Mountain Lion would not allow users to access secure Web sites with parental controls, among others.

The specific fixes addressed in the updates are the following:

OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Supplemental Update (26.65MB)

Resolves an issue that may cause certain Japanese characters … Read more

Use Wi-Fi diagnostics to find active Bonjour services in OS X

Apple's Bonjour service in OS X is a convenient zero-configuration autodiscovery technology that allows the operating system to locate and present various network services available to you. For example, if a computer on the network has file sharing available, then the system will discover that and make it available in relevant areas of the system such as the Finder, and also allow your system to easily discover shared printers, remote log-in capability, screen sharing, and similar services the remote computer may have enabled.

While convenient, most of the services that Bonjour broadcasts are contextual, meaning that they only appear … Read more

Do you need OS X Server?

In addition to the standard OS X installation that you purchase from the Mac App Store, you can use Apple's OS X Server package to convert your system into OS X Server. If you're wondering what it is for and what it will do to the system when installed, read on.

MacFixIt reader Pedro recently wrote in with questions that others interested in the server will undoubtedly have:

[With regard to Apple's Server package], can you run OS X Server on an iMac running Mountain Lion? Do you end up with two machines: the server and the … Read more

How to connect to a Windows machine from OS X

While the default and most supported file-sharing protocol in OS X is AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), Apple does include support for sharing files with Windows machines using the SMB (server message block) protocol. With OS X being a Unix-based system, Apple initially included the popular open-source Samba suite as the means for doing this, but because of licensing violations had to replace it with its own SMB implementation.

Regardless of the specifics of the SMB implementation, the methods by which you can connect to Windows machines should be the same throughout the various versions of OS X:

Use Bonjour services … Read more