Troubleshooting

Got Bluetooth problems like a glitchy mouse or an unreliable keyboard? Maybe a screwy trackpad or poor headphone connection? Any of those problems could result from a glitch in your Mac’s Bluetooth radio. Maybe you’ve already tried everything — unpairing your devices, resetting them or even creating a pristine new user account on your Mac solely for troubleshooting purposes.

You may even know about the hidden Bluetooth menu that appears when you option-click on the Bluetooth menu bar icon. But did you know that there’s another, deeper, super-hidden menu with extra troubleshooting tools? There is. Here’s how to fix Bluetooth problems when nothing else seems to work.

Christmas time means packing up your daily troubles, forgetting work for a week, and heading home to… troubleshoot your parents’ broken computers and gadgets? Oh man, is it that time of year again already? That’s the problem with being the family’s only geek – you get handed all the geek jobs. However, you can turn this to your advantage, and make it a lot easier, by going in prepared. Check out our Holiday Troubleshooting Guide right here.

Christmas time means packing up your daily troubles, forgetting work for a week, and heading home to … troubleshoot your parents’ broken computers and gadgets? Oh man, is it that time of year again already?

That’s the problem with being the family’s only geek — you get handed all the geek jobs. However, you can turn this to your advantage, and make it a lot easier, by going in prepared. Check out our Holiday Troubleshooting Guide right here.

If your Mac is sick, the first step is to restart it. But did you know that there are several tricks you can perform while your Mac is starting up?

Many of these are advanced Mac diagnostic tools, which shouldn’t be used unless you really know what you’re doing. But some not-so-secret startup keyboard combos will remove a stuck disk (if your Mac is old enough to even have a disk inside), let you boot your Mac from a USB drive, or to turn your entire computer into one big storage disk to connect to another computer.

If you have a 2011 MacBook Pro that is wonking out like it was haunted by a Japanese ghost, you’re not the only one. It appears that a massive number of early-2011 MacBook Pro owners with AMD graphics are having issues with system crashes and hardware problems, with failure rates reaching a critical mass in recent weeks.

So, it happened that a friend of mine turned off Bluetooth on her Mac mini, and then turned it off for the evening. When she got up the next morning, her Bluetooth keyboard was on, as per usual, but she couldn’t log in on start up, as her Mac did not see her keyboard.

She was worried that she’d have to go borrow or buy a wired keyboard, plug it in, and enter her password, then turn Bluetooth on again to make her wireless keyboard work again.

Luckily, that’s not what had to happen. Here’s how we solved it.

While many of us already have our eyes set on the new iPhone, which Apple will likely release this fall, there are still millions of people using the iPhone 4.

Released on June 24, 2010, the first round of iPhone 4’s are about to hit their two-year anniversary. This means that those who purchased an iPhone 4 along with the AppleCare protection plan, which effectively extends warranty protection to two years, are about to lose coverage.

If you bought an iPhone 4 in the summer of 2010 you should take some time to examine it in order to ensure that no part of it is showing signs of defect. Here’s what you need to know.

Last week, Microsoft pulled its Service Pack 2 update for Office for Mac 2011. As we reported earlier in the week, the update could result in the corruption of the Office database and issues with Office identity files could make resolving the problem difficult. After initially posting advice about the update and its potential problems, Microsoft pulled it from the company’s update servers.

Microsoft has now re-released the update. In addition to not creating the problems that plagued the original update, the new version will also correct problems for users that had downloaded the initial.

The entire situation illustrates why most tech companies, including Apple, advise business customers to wait before rolling out any new updates.

Jailbreaking has its many benefits, but there’s always a risk that installing a certain tweak or app from Cydia will cause something in iOS to go haywire. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you want to be able to fix the problem without having to restore and lose your jailbreak.

Luckily, there’s a relatively easy way to troubleshoot your jailbroken iOS device and find out the exact tweak that’s causing the problem.

For a lot of people, yesterday’s 10.7.3 update for OS X Lion went without a hitch using Software Update, but for a sizable (and understandably annoyed) minority, the update resulted in the widescale crashing of apps and the replacement of stock Lion UI elements with a mysterious “CUI?” error.

If you’ve been bit by this error, you have our sympathies, but buck up! In most cases, it’s a pretty easy thing to fix the update and get Lion working as it was.

The first jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 became available to the public last week, and many are jailbreaking their A5-based iOS devices and trying out new tweaks from Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store.

Whether you’re new to jailbreaking or an experienced veteran, it’s easy to run into problems. We’ve collected some useful tips and tricks for jailbreaking your iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

The iPhone 4S has some bodacious battery life problems and no one seems to know what’s going on. Apple themselves have released an iOS update, iOS 5.0.1, to fix the problems, to no avail. Meanwhile, some iPhone 4S owners find their batteries draining at a rate of 10% every ten minutes, while luckier customers can only report the same excellent battery life the iPhone 4 was known for.

What the heck is going on? Are some iPhone 4Ses just defective? Will Apple have to initiate a recall?

Thankfully, no. Although no one knows what the problem exactly is, it has at least been proven to be a software problem… not a hardware problem.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately while considering the possible reasons why my new iPhone 4S has the worst battery life of any iPhone I’ve ever owned. Normally by now I would have written some battery troubleshooting tips to share with all of you. However, this time around the problem is anything but normal and the usual tips aren’t helping. So I’ve been quiet about this.

I cannot say the same thing about Apple’s discussion forums since the conversation about battery life there is reaching epic proportions and the conversation is rather loud.

It might be about to get a lot quieter with this tip, which seems to be working for me.

Having problems with battery life since upgrading to the iPhone 4S? Apple may be getting in touch with you to help them troubleshoot your battery problems, hopefully solving the iPhone 4S’s woeful drainage issues once and for all.

Readers continue to contact us with questions about their Macs and iDevices, so we’ve decided to run Ask MacRx more frequently during the week. Today we address one of the most common questions for a Mac consultant, why do I get that spinning beach ball all the time?

It seems like there is never a day goes by that I am not confronted with the Spinning Ball of Death, most often while in Safari (although granted, that is the application that I use most frequently). Lately (post Lion installation) I have even been getting a message “Browser is Not Responding.”

Did you just get a beautiful, new MacBook Air? Apple’s new notebooks are super-slim, and they work great with OS X Lion.

However, installing Snow Leopard on a 2011 MacBook Air may not go over so well, as Apple’s older cat doesn’t apparently play nice with its newest notebook. Luckily, Apple has published a KnowledgeBase article to help you fix Snow Leopard on your brand new MacBook Air.

Hopefully by now you’re running Apple’s shiny new cat, OS X Lion, on your Mac. You may be noticing all the improvements and changes that Apple made in Lion, and we recommend reading our comprehensive review of Lion for all the info you need to know about the latest edition of OS X.

For most users, upgrading to Lion is a smooth and pain-free process. For others, there seems to be several problems, specifically with intermittent Wi-Fi dropouts.

There’s no doubt that the original version of TeamViewer — a free OS X and iOS app that lets users remotely commandeer another user’s Mac (with their permission, of course) and troubleshoot stuff — is a Big Gun for any Mac troubleshooter or wannabe Genius (or hey, maybe even the real Geniuses use it).

Working as a Mac consultant brings me in contact with several dozen different Macintosh systems every month. Many needs and tasks are common – OS upgrades, backups, system slowdowns, troubleshooting startup or WiFi problems. Like any good mechanic there are a few items in my toolbox which I favor above others. From built-in tools like Disk Utility, Network Utility and Console to third-party tools like DiskWarrior, FileSalvage and iStumbler, these items help get the job done.

The new MacBook Air is a remarkably solid wafer of hardware, especially after the recent EFI Firmware Update that solved the occasional issue of graphics corruption when the Air wakes up from sleep.

It looks, though, like there may be a new crisis brewing and a new glitch to address, this time with the Air’s ability to play nice with he official USB Ethernet Adapter.

A number of Cult of Mac readers, and numerous more on Apple’s Discussion boards, have reported a bevy of problems–some large, some small–after upgrading to iOS 4 or the iPhone 4. I don’t plan on boring you with a list of what users were complaining about. Instead, I will give you four troubleshooting tips that generally fix most, but not necessarily all iPhone and iOS problems.

Even if Leander can’t quite figure out how to use it, the multi-touch capable Magic Mouse is quite a stride forward for Mac owners… especially given Apple’s execrable history of making decent mice. Still, no new piece of gear is without its technological problems. No surprise, then, that the Apple support forums have become the petri dish in which isolated Magic Mouse troubleshooting complaints have been allowed to multiply into a wider culture sample of product failure.