General application troubleshooting

Does an application stall, freeze, or stop working? If your problems occur only with one particular application or action, and are fairly repeatable, they should be easy to fix:

1. Reboot your Mac to sweep your computer’s RAM clean.
2. Check the publisher’s website or www.download.com for updates or patches to the program, and try installing them. You may have a known problem that has already been solved.
3. Using the Accounts panel in System Preferences, create a brand-new user. Log in as that user and attempt to repeat the problem. That will give you a clean set of preferences to test out. If the problem goes away, log out, log back in under your regular user name, and delete (or at least move) the application’s preferences from Macintosh HD/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences folder in your home directory (your folder in the Users folder). If the problem didn’t go away when you logged in as a new user, the problem is being caused by the application or operating system.
4. Some problems can be traced to corrupt, damaged or compressed fonts. You can use Apple’s built-in Font Book application to verify your fonts (see the instructions under question, “An application I frequently run won’t start up“. If you are using Suitcase, Font Reserve, or another font management program, use it to close all your fonts. Restart the computer and see if the problem is solved. If so, you need to work your way through your fonts and see which one is the culprit.
5. If these steps don’t solve the problem, contact the company that publishes the program. Many vendors offer good free tech support, and sometimes you will have a standard problem that they can quickly identify and tell you how to fix. Many vendors also have support forums online. This is especially useful for those vendors that charge for telephone tech support, as their online support is still free. You also get the benefit of the input from other users, who may have encountered the same problems and have workarounds you can use until the vendor fixes the bug.

Always write down the steps you are trying. If you eventually need outside help, the record will be very helpful. But writing a novel won’t help—generally a service provider will have trouble solving any problem that can’t be described in a few sentences.

Published March 24, 2009 12:00 PM
Last modified on November 30, 2010 2:39 PM