BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR INSTALL
BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR DRIVERS
BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR SOFTWARE

So every time you log in, these programs are going to run. These are programs that might be starting when you log in. You can take a look at your User Account and on your User Account, you have Login Items. If you go into System Preferences and in your System preferences go into the User Accounts, the Users and Groups right here.

BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR INSTALL

Some of the applications you install might do that as well. But when you fire up your MAC and log in, you might have it set to Launch Applications Automatically. And what we're doing there is what's called safe mode.

BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR SOFTWARE

Well, we can tell the MAC to just boot up with the apple approved software, take all our third party software out of the mix, right. And when you log in, it's going to load the apple-approved desktop and then all of the third party applications afterwards, right. After that it's going to get to the login screen.

BACK TO MAC PROGRAM STANDS FOR DRIVERS

And then it's going to load third party drivers and extensions that we might have installed for any extra hardware that we might have. When you power on your Mac, it runs through a whole boot process that we're going to cover a little bit later, but in brief, basically you're going to boot your operating system, and the operating system is going to load all of the apple-approved drivers and extensions. But there's an easy way that we can quickly and easily test to see if this is hardware-related or software-related. Well, we'll talk about troubleshooting hardware in another episode. So if you have RAM that's going bad in your system, they can cause practically everything that I've described in this episode. Is there a way to tell if a problem is software or hardware related? - Good point, right? So I, I'm kind of focused on software cause we're troubleshooting applications, but hardware can cause a lot of the problems I just described, especially failing memory.

And it's up to us to figure out exactly which application is causing the problem and get it out of the way. Now I can't even interact with the applications. What if it's not just one application crashing? What if I press power on the computer and it doesn't get to a login screen? Now I'm really stuck, right? Or I get to the login screen, but then it crashes before it gets to a desktop. But the reality is there's a lot more that we can do as IT professionals and problems can go even further. They can reboot their computer or they can just like force close an application. And from the end user's perspective, there's not a lot they can do. Maybe you can switch to another application and that one works, but the first application is broken. So you see that spinning and you know, the computer's working, you can tell because it's spinning, but it's not responsive. The, and nobody likes going to the beach. They can see the screen, but they can't type or use their mouse or the most common one is the spinning pinwheel of death, right? - Oh, your beach ball - Where your mouse cursor changes into a little beach ball or whatever, you know, multi-color - I call it the beach ball of doom.

Their computer is being slow, right? Or their computer randomly reboots, or it locks up. An end user complains about their computer. A crazy application can do all sorts of things, right? But you, you guys have heard this before. So what kind of problems can applications cause in our systems? - All right, there are a, it's almost better to do a list of like what can't they cause, right. How do we get to where we can log back in again, and see some of the really cool diagnostic tools and troubleshooting tools that are built right into Mac OS. So in this episode, we're going to learn a little bit about what that looks like, what are some of the problems the applications can cause, and then how do we troubleshoot it? How do we go and figure out which application is causing the problem? How do we get it to where, you know, maybe we can't even log in. It's very easy to use operating system, but applications can sometimes break. You know, one of the old slogans of Apple was that it just works, and for the most part, it does. I'm Zach and this is Don, and we're going to be doing some troubleshooting, getting in there, finding out what might be causing application software, hardware troubles, things like that.

Are applications giving you problems on your Mac OS? Join us as we troubleshoot.

Back to mac program stands for