Avoiding Trouble with Your Apple Macintosh
Problems are almost inevitable, though they can for the most part be staved off by sensible action, care and caution. For example, if you persistenly have to force reboot after system hangs, this is symptomatic of a larger problem and needs to be dealt with, don’t ignore problems, as they they will go away, especially if they are repetitive problems.
Perform regular checks! In the same way you might take yourself to the doctor for annual check ups. It takes nothing of your time, to startup the system off the Boot DVD and to run the various checks and corrections in the Disk Utility provided by Apple. Who knows what it might find, a bad disk catalogue and the possibility of corrupted files might not early on outwardly display itself in the form of a crashing system, and it is always best to try and catch this early. I recently saw a Mac with pitch black screen after startup and which sounded like it was working properly but might have had a faulty screen. The fix? To rebuild the desk using DiskWarrior.
Do clean installs every once in a while. I used to reinstall my Mac every 6 months under Mac OS 9, nowadays I probably havent reinstalled for nearly 12 or 18 months and I have experienced little or no trouble. Having said that, there is nothing liek doing some spring cleaning and getting rid of the junk that is slowing up the computer or causing problems.
Backup! Backup! Backup! You can never stress this enough. Even if you never need it, at least you have the piece of mind. Despite the availability of file recovery software and more, it is MUCH easier to recover data from a backup than it is to try and salvage it from a faulty hard drive with absolutely NO guarantees! And given the cost of drives this day, no one has any excuse, because the cost of any potential loss is FAR higher than the cost of even the most expensive 300GB drive these days.
