Re: Digital Exorcism
Re: Digital Exorcism
- Subject: Re: Digital Exorcism
- From: John Gnaegy <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 10:43:26 -0800
From: email@hidden (Anthony Sanna)
when was the last time that FileMaker Pro - just twiddling its thumbs in
the background, no less - brought your Mac down? ...or that Photoshop,
sitting on a totally inactive computer, throws a type 10 error out of
the
blue? The ONLY significant changes to my setup have been PS6 and System
9.1 - but then I've done a clean disk-wipe and reinstall of ALL
applications, fonts, and 9.0.4 from CD, and then a re-upgrade to 9.1
after a week of 9.0.4 made no difference.
a Complete Software Exorcism is:
1) Boot off your system CD.
2) Erase the volume, or even better, reinitialize the drive with Drive
Setup (if you only have one volume on your drive, go ahead and
reinitialize it. Erasing the volume is more convenient only if you have
other volumes on that drive you want to keep intact.)
3) Run Disk First Aid in Repair mode twice (yes, twice). You probably
don't need to do this on a freshly initialized volume, but hey, if it
makes you feel better what the heck.
4) Install the system software and any system updates, so 9.0, then
9.0.4, then 9.1. Better yet install 9.1 off the CD. It's best to just
shell out for the CD instead of doing incremental updates because it's
faster than three installations and updates don't always include
everything.
5) Boot off your freshly installed volume and set your system prefs
(TCP/IP, network, etc) and do something simple...can you go to
www.apple.com with Explorer without the machine freezing? Open up
Graphing Calculator and put it in Full Demo mode. If you leave the
machine for half an hour is it still running Graphing Calculator or has
it frozen and crashed? (Basically this checks for heat related hard
ware problems.)
6) Install some applications. If you had a problem with several apps in
particular, install one of them and see how it works, then install the
second, see how it works, then the third, etc. Avoid installing every
piece of software and every extension you have at the same time if you
think there's a conflict between some of them.
This does take a while so I wouldn't do it every time an app crashes,
but this is the most complete way to eliminate or pin down software
problems.
If you finish step 5 and your machine still hangs with Explorer or
SimpleText or just sitting in the Finder for an hour, then there's
probably something wrong with your hardware. I've had machines do
exactly that, install system software just fine, reboot just fine,
launch Explorer or Simpletext just fine...but let it sit for an hour,
come back and the cursor's frozen, or there's an error dialog on
screen. Sometimes the heat conductive glue that holds the heat sink to
the processor chip dries out, or the heat sink has been knocked a little
loose (maybe because you were poking it). So when the machine's "cold"
it works fine, but after a while the inefficiently attached heat sink
lets the processor overheat and wham, it locks up. I'm sure there are
dozens of other possible hardware issues but that one I know from
experience. Minor power spikes can fry certain parts of your memory but
leave the rest intact, so everything's great until the system tries to
retrieve info from the damaged memory segment, then boom. That's a
cheery thought isn't it?
---
John
email@hidden
colorsync testing