Even though Mac is a very fine operating system and arguably far more stable and secure than other OSs, Mac has its own woes. It happens sometimes that Mac starts behaving strangely, locking up, endless ‘beach balls’, applications settings making no sense and serving you with similar annoyances. So what’s wrong ?

There are three usual suspects; disk errors, permissions and cache.

So lets have a look at how to fix each of them. Please note, these are ‘usual’ suspects, there might be something else wrong with your computer but fixing these three will give you a very good chance of happy life afterwards.

Repairing disk

Your hard disk may have developed a few bad sectors that give you lots of heartache. The reasons for this may be various, wear and tear due to ageing of your equipment, power outages, or even physical abuse, like kicking the box when it doesn’t work the way it should. If your hard disk is on its way to heaven then the only solution is to get another one, but in all other cases ‘Repairing the disk’ will help.

Get your installation CD or DVD and boot your Mac from it. (Press ‘C’ while starting up) Once the computer has started (and you selected the language if asked) please ignore any installation questions but rather jump to the top of your screen and select

Utilities | Disk utility (10.4)
Installer | Disk utility (10.3 and earlier)

Once Disk utility opens, select your start up disk on the left of the window. I called it iMac but it’s usually called Macintosh HD.

Picture 11.png

First Aid tab should already be selected, but if not please do so. Then on the bottom of the window click Repair Disk. In my example it’s greyed-out because I’m using the sample from normal working environment, but if you boot your Mac from installation CD/DVD, you will be able to click it.

Picture 22.png

After Repair Disk is finished simply close the window (Cmd-Q), exit installation process and reboot your Mac.

Repairing permissions

It happens that program installers sometimes set the files permissions incorrectly, or change permissions for files that they have not much to do with. This can reflect in your Mac’s sluggish performance.

To repair permissions you can again use Disk Utility. This time you don’t have to boot from CD/DVD but rather from your start up disk. So, once your Mac is up and running and you are logged into your account, quit all running applications, open Finder, go to Applications | Utilities and start Disk Utility.

Just like in the example above, select your start up disk, then click on First Aid and then on the bottom of the screen click on Repair Disk Permissions.

Picture 32.png

In the log window you will see all the changes that Disk Utility has done. Once you see “Permission repair complete” you can close the Disk Utility, the process is finished.

Picture 41.png

Cache

System, user or application cache may also cause your Mac to respond in a funny way and to fix this your best option is to use third party application such as Onyx or Yasu. Both are free downloads, so go and get them (well, one will do), read the instructions and clear the cache. Once you finish, reboot your Mac and your machine should respond very nicely now.

[tags]OSX permissions, preferences, cache [/tags]