System Errors and Crashes

System Errors and Crashes

System errors and other fun stuff that you encounter in your daily activities can almost always be contributed to a software conflict or hardware issue, sometimes it is a combination of both. These little slowdowns can usually be tracked down and eliminated without a lot of technical knowledge or experience. Here are the basic steps to help you make your Mac even more reliable and fun. There are many other possible problems, sometimes they can be very complex. Use the following info as a first step in solving any weird problems that you may be having (computer related, of course).

1. When does the problem happen?
A lot of the time system errors, bombs, freezes and crashing occur only when you perform a certain sequence of actions. Several examples are spell checking in one program, printing from another, during boot (when you first turn the computer on) or right after boot up.

2. Did you add anything to the computer recently?
New peripherals (like hard drives and scanners) or new software programs are a frequent cause. Many times they can conflict with something that you already have on the machine.

Answers:

Narrow the problem down. If the problem happened after you added a new screen saver, remove it. Sometimes you can change the load order of a critter so that it doesn’t fight with something else. This is done by adding a space ” ” or a tilde “~” in front of the items name. To find these items look in your System Folder which will be on your hard drive. In the System Folder are the Control Panels and Extensions folders – one or both of these will contain the software you’re looking for.

If the new scanner you just hooked up is causing problems, check the cables or try the machine without the scanner. Check the SCSI ID (or change the ID to a different number such as 2,3,4,5 or 6). Verify that it is terminated either externally (external terminators look like a dummy cable end) or internally (internal terminators can have an on/off switch on the back of the device).

Sometimes you have to upgrade a driver to a newer version. Check the documentation that came with the device or call the manufacturer to find out what is the latest. The internet also offers many great sources to obtain this information. Check out the company’s home page, get on a mailing list, browse a newsgroup or email your consultant.

Real world experience:

The Computer:
Macintosh Quadra with plenty of RAM, disk space & System 7.5.

Scenario –

A client had recently upgraded to Adobe Pagemaker 6.0 and was having difficulty converting existing version 5 documents. Every other file that they tried to convert would cause the machine to either freeze, crash or bomb. After talking to Adobe tech support they had tried working with extensions off, system 7.5 only, reinstalled both the application and system software, ran Norton utilities and zapped the PRAM to no avail. The interesting part is that any other program worked fine, and Pagemaker would only crash when converting certain older documents. They could convert the same documents on a different computer with no difficulty.

Solution –

I booted the machine with my external hard drive to prove if the problem was related to their system software. My drive worked fine when converting the files. This proved that something in their system software was causing the problem. I then isolated 2 corrupt fonts that were used in those older documents. To do so I removed all of their fonts, and replaced them with the set from my hard drive. Their machine worked fine when converting the docs. I then added a small number of their fonts at a time until I could duplicate the problem (the client of course had several hundred fonts, so it was not a trivial task) and used this procedure to isolate the bad fonts – of which, 3 suitcases were corrupt.