Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

Chapter B. Trouble shooting

Whether it's a car engine or an operating system, anything with several thousand parts can develop the occasional technical hiccup. Mac OS X is far more resilient than its predecessors, but it's still a complex system with the potential for occasional glitch es.

If you're used to an older operating system, beware: very few pages of the traditional trouble shooting workbook apply to Mac OS X. Mac OS 9 veterans can forget about giving a program more memory, turning off system extensions, and rebuilding the desktop. Windows refugees can forget all about driver conflicts, IRQs, and the Registry.

In short, Mac OS X is a whole new world when it comes to troubleshooting.

It's safe to say that you'll have to do less troubleshooting in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9 or Windows, especially considering that most freaky little glitches go away if you just try these two steps, one at a time:

• Quit and restart the way ward program.

• Log out and log back in again.

It's the other problems that will drive you batty.