Calling for help:

There are a few things you can do to streamline the process of getting help with your software:

• Keep notes: Make detailed notes of what went wrong, what software you were running, and what you were doing immediately before your machine crashed. Particularly note the error message (if any) that popped up. If you can, note which Extensions and Control Panels were active when you started having trouble.
  
• Be specific: When calling for help, be as specific as you can when describing the problem. A statement like "It just doesn't work" isn't enough for someone to recommend a solution. Be as detailed as you can about what you did just before the problem, and what you saw on the screen, but for now, try to avoid speculating about what went wrong. The first step is to gather the information, the second step is to narrow down the possible avenues to where the problem lies.
  
• Important: if you have just installed some software, or made a configuration change, mention this, no matter if you think it's related to the problem or not. A machine that has been running fine for months won't "go bad" on its own; almost always, it's a consquence of some change having been made to the configuration.
  
• Keep track of your software: Make a list of all the software that you have installed on your machine, including version numbers and serial or registration numbers if applicable. Keep this log book up to date as you add new software and update older software. This will come in very handy when calling someone for technical support, 'cause they'll be guaranteed to ask you. Having the serial/registration numbers written down in a central place is a good idea in case the original disks or manuals are lost or destroyed; you'll likely need these numbers to order replacement disks or to install upgraded versions.
  
• Call the right people: Try to make your suport call to the company who is responsible for the product that is giving you trouble. This one can be tough, because it involves making an educated guess as to where the problem originates. There are a few guidelines, such as deciding whether it is a hardware or a software based problem: if you have trouble spell checking with a word processing program, Apple is not going to be able to help you, because they didn't manufacture the word processor program. An alternative is to call a consulting company like Quill Services Ltd., who have a wide knowledge of many software and hardware products; this will involve a cost for the consulting, but may save you a great deal of wasted time.
  
• Keep a log: Maintain a log book or diary of the information above - the software that you have installed, and any crashes or freezes that you suffer. Tracking down the root cause of problems often requires spotting a trend or a pattern over time. Having a log will speed this diagnosis up. Good documentation of problems could also be the deciding factor in pursuing a warranty claim against a manufacturer.
  

Important note about Norton Utilities:

If you have Norton SpeedDisk 3.0, DO NOT USE IT. Get the upgrade to 3.1 because 3.0 can do serious damage to your hard drive's data. Power Macintosh owners should use Norton Utilities version 3.12 or later, those with hard drives larger than 2 Gb should use 3.2 or later. These are not available online, you have to call or write Symantec, and they will mail the disks to you.

If you have a PowerMacintosh 7200 or 7500, use the NUMSpot utility to check your drive before you use Norton Utilities Disk Doctor for the first time. During a certain period of manufacturing, Apple's hard disk installation process was leaving a "ghost" directory on the hard drive. This directory is invisible to the user, but confuses Norton Utilities into reporting and attempting to fix non-existent errors, which can lead to data loss. NUMSpot detects and erases the ghost directories before they cause a problem.

Installing Software:

Before installing a new piece of software, use Disinfectant or Symantec Anti-Virus to scan the installation floppies for viruses (virii ?). Then, restart your Macintosh and hold the Shift key down through the startup procedure, until you see the Welcome to Macintosh - Extensions Off message. This will turn off your virus protection and any other extensions that may conflict with the installation process. Install the software according to the instructions, then restart your machine again but this time don't hold the Shift key.

Exception: If you are installing from a CD-ROM, you can't turn all of the extensions off, because your CD wouldn't access. Instead, use Extensions Manager (comes with System 7.5 or available from Quill) to create an extension set called CD Only, with just Apple CD-ROM (or your other brand of CD driver), High Sierra File Access, ISO 9660 File Access and Foreign File Access. Restart with this set, then install.

Making Backups:

Make sure that you keep multiple backup copies of your data files. If you aren't familiar with backing up, please call us and we can schedule an appointment to set up a backup plan with you. Back up your data before doing any major operation on the hard drive, such as running a disk doctor like Norton Utilities, optimizing, sending a machine in for repair, installing another drive, etc.

One important caution: If you are experiencing trouble of any kind with your hard disk, when you back it up prior to repairing, do not use your old backup media! Use a fresh set of diskettes or SyQuest cartridges or tapes. It may well be that some of the data files on your disk are trashed, and if you overwrite the files in your last backup set, you may be erasing the only good examples of your files.

I've sometimes had to go back 3 generations of backup to find a valid file, because the file damage was lurking undetected for weeks, and I was faithfully backing up garbage. Thank goodness for that old backup.

Important: System Disks

Performa and PowerBook owners and anyone else who has a machine that did not come with System floppy disks or CD-ROMs: You are going to have to create your own System diskettes from the Disk Images folder on your hard drive. You are going to need these disks sooner or later. Do it now - once you run into hard drive trouble, it's too late.

If you have pre-installed software on the machine, you may have to create your own backup disks of this, too. If you have a choice between making a full backup of your drive, and making individual floppies from the disk images, make the individual floppies. That way, you can reinstall the system or just a portion of it, without having to restore the entire contents of the drive. While you are sitting there with your 29 floppy disks making these backups, repeat to yourself "I saved $ 25 on the price of my machine. I saved $ 25 on the price of my machine". Do it now - we'll wait for you.

If you bought a PowerMac 7500 or 8500 in the first few months of production, the Disk Tools and Install 1 floppies that you received don't work (neither do the disk images on the CD-ROM). You can download new ones from Apple or get them from Quill Services. Do it before you need them.

Using Disk Optimizers and Repair Utilities:

If you are running a disk optimizer (like SpeedDisk or Disk Express) or a disk doctor (like Norton Utilities or MacTools), first use Extensions Manager to restart with all extensions off except for any automatic file compression software that you regularly use ( e.g. DiskDoubler, AutoDoubler, SpaceSaver or Stacker).

Then, allocate the maximum amount of RAM you can to the optimizer/disk doctor program (especially important for drives larger than 400 Mb). This will minimize the chance of the optimizer/disk doctor program crashing from lack of memory.

Internet Software:

Once you are up and running on the Internet, make backup copies onto a floppy of MacTCP, InterSLIP or MacPPP and all their preference files and scripts. MacTCP in particular is easy to corrupt, and if you have a backup disk with all the settings already set, it can save a lot of time in getting yourself back up and running. Next, open the settings dialogue boxes of each control panel and use the built in screen capture f-key (Shift-Command 3) to print out a screen shot of the settings. Put those somewhere safe and you are doubly protected from losing your net connection.

PowerMac 7200, 7500, 8500, 9500 and PowerBook 5300 machines all have special considerations that you have to take into account when connecting to the Internet. They can work quite well if you get all of the software configured correctly.

Keyboard Weirdness:

If you have unexplained things happening with your keyboard, such as typing one letter and having a different letter appear, or a menu command activate by itself, then follow these steps:

1. Remove Easy Access from your System folder
2. Go to the Keyboard Control Panel and reset your Keyboard Layout to either US or US System 6.0
3. Either uncheck the box which says "Use Command-Option-Spacebar to rotate between Keyboard Layouts", or delete any foreign language keyboard layouts from your System Folder.

Crashes, software conflicts:

Check your cables: The first step to resolving persistent crashes is to check your SCSI cabling, ID numbers and termination. Don't just assume that its OK because it was fine last week; turn off your Mac and peripherals, and actually unplug and re-plug all the cables to seat them properly. Check and double check the ID numbers on all the drives to make sure that no two devices have the same SCSI ID, and make sure that the last device on the chain has a terminator. Marginal termination or partly unplugged cables can cause disk errors, mystery data corruption and random crashing. Consider switching to high quality SCSI cables and active terminators.

Here is a series of steps in the rough order that you should try them. If you aren't sure about doing this yourself, call us and we can help you over the phone or schedule and appointment to come out to see you.

• Increase the amount of RAM allocated to the program that you are trying to run. Quit the program, find its program icon in the Finder, click once on it, choose File:Get Info, and adjust the Preferred memory amount.

• Rebuild the desktop by restarting with Command and Option held down, or use TechTool to erase the old desktop files and force a rebuild.

• Start with Extensions off. Restart your machine while holding down the Shift key. If it then runs properly, you have a problem with your Extensions, Control Panels or Fonts. Using Extensions Manager, Now Startup Manager or Conflict Catcher, disable all Extensions, Control Panels and fonts, then add a few back at a time, until the problem returns. Replace or eliminate the offending item; or perhaps, change its start-up order by renaming it.
  Check "The Complete Conflict Compendium" to see if one or more of your programs, Control Panels or Extensions conflict with each other (see Reinstall your System below for more on isolating conflicts)

• Run Disk First Aid from your Disk Tools floppy or System CD-ROM to see if there's a disk problem. If it repairs problems, run it repeatedly until you get three passes in a row with no problems reported. (To force a recent-model Mac to start from your System CD-ROM, restart and hold the C key down throught the startup routine).

• Reset Parameter RAM. Hold Command-Option-P-R as you restart, as you continue holding these keys, you will hear the startup "chime" sound again. Keep holding the keys until you hear the chime 3 times. Alternatively, you can use TechTool.

• Delete Finder Preferences. Go into the Preferences Folder in your System Folder. Find and throw into the Trash the Finder Preferences file. Restart.

• Program specific: If you problem only occurs while using a particular program or while doing a specific action such as printing:
  • Delete the application's Settings file or Preferences file (e.g. Photoshop Prefs, LaserWriter Prefs, Word Settings, Xpress Prefs), usually found in the Preferences Folder in the System Folder (but sometimes in the application's folder, as with Quark Xpress); restart the Mac and try again.
  • If that doesn't help, re-install the program from its original disks.
  • Check to see if the application is the latest version, and if it is compatible with your machine and System version. This may require a call to the manufacturer. One hint is to check the copyright date or creation date in the Get Info box. Many programs from the 80's run just fine on the latest PowerMacs, but commercial programs generally will be upgraded every year, so be wary of dates more than a couple of years old.

• Re-install the System. For the most thorough exorcism, do a clean install (hold down Command-Shift-K while choosing Install), or trash your old system files first. To do this restart with the System Tools disk inserted. Find System and Finder, pull out of System folder and rename them, then restart and run system installer. You may have to re-install certain utilities from their original disks. If you do a clean install, you will have to move your third-party extensions and other System Folder components (including fonts and preferences) from your old System Folder into the new System Folder. Do this in stages or even one at a time, restarting and checking to see if your machine crashes or not, to check whether one of these components is the culprit. (Hint: It'll be the last one that you re-installed before the problem reappeared)

• Reinstall your fonts. It's rare, but font corruption can cause odd crashes. Suspect a corrupted font if you are using Suitcase II and removing Suitcase II from the Extensions Folder makes the crashing problem go away (see below).

• Simplify SCSI. Operate with no external SCSI devices for a while, if possible. If your problems go away when there's nothing attached to the SCSI port, then suspect a cabling, SCSI ID# or termination problem.

• Disk repair and recovery utilities Utilities such as MacTools and Norton Utilities can be very effective, but they should not be used until SCSI problems and Extension conflicts have been ruled out, and you have made a backup. Read their respective manuals so that you know what to expect. Start from another hard drive or from CD-ROM before running these programs; you can also use an emergency floppy disk to start the machine, but this must be prepared before you have trouble (check the manuals for instructions).

• Startup options: (For recent Macintoshes) To force the machine to ignore the internal hard drive at startup, and boot from another drive, hold Command-Option-Shift-Delete. If there is a floppy disk with a valid System Folder in the disk drive when you start, the machine will always boot from the floppy. If you don't want it to attempt to boot from the floppy, hold the mouse button down throught the startup procedure. If the machine will boot with Extensions off, you can use the Startup Device Control Panel to specify which drive you want the machine to boot from next time it is restarted.

• "This Macintosh cannot be started from System 7.x - use a newer System" - This message is somewhat misleading. If you see it, it means that the drive that you are attempting to start the machine from has a System Folder, but that System is lacking one or more of the components that are specific to that model of machine. Often, what's missing is a file called a System Enabler, which should be at the root level of the System Folder. There are about a dozen different System Enablers for the different models of Macintosh, (Apple System Enablers Archive) and there is no way to fit all of them onto one diskette. The result is that the System diskettes and CD-ROMs are usually specific to particular machines. Third party accelerator boards, hard drives and display cards may also require specific System extensions to start up. Note too that some machines like the newer PowerMacs require entirely different System versions to run (this should be homogenized again with the imminent release of System 7.5.3). If you have more than one machine, you will need to label and keep separate the System Disks for your different machines.
  One useful idea if you are in charge of a number of machines, is to use an external hard drive or removeable cartridge drive as an emergency boot disk. Configure it with all of the System Enablers and other components sufficient to boot all of your machines. Also put on the recovery utilities that you may need: Disk First Aid, HD SC Setup, whichever third-party formatters you have, SCSIProbe, DiskTester, a backup utility, Norton Utilities or MacTools. Then you won't have to do a mad scramble for disks when you need to work on a machine.

• Unreadable hard drive. If you have a question mark or "X" on your screen when you try to boot, you may need to reinstall your hard disk driver (which is a specific area of information on the drive which identifies it to the Macintosh System). One sign of this is if the icon of the hard drive does not show up on the desktop when you boot from another drive, floppy or CD-ROM.

  If you have a stock Apple hard drive, boot from your Disk Tools disk or System CD-ROM, and run either Apple HD SC Setup or Drive Setup formatting software, whichever your machine came with. If you can select your hard drive on the opening screen, do so, and choose the "Update" option (don't choose Initialize, or you'll say "bye-bye" to all of your data). If the update is successful, you should be able to run Disk First Aid, and reinstall the System software if necessary.

  If you have an aftermarket hard drive, then instead of Apple's HD SC Setup, you will use whichever third-party formatting software that the drive was originally formatted with (e.g. FWB Hard Disk Toolkit, Silverlining, Drive 7). Most of these programs have an option to "update" the SCSI driver information.
  

  If your hard drive is not recognized by the formatting software, then you probably have a cabling problem or a malfunctioning hard drive mechanism.

If you are using graphic or DTP programs, it is recommended to remove the System files Macintosh Easy Open, Easy Access and Apple Menu Options, because they conflict with a variety of programs.

If you are using Macintosh Easy Open, before you rebuild the Desktop on your machine (see Rebuilding the Desktop), restart your machine will all extensions off Except make sure to leave Macintosh Easy Open active. If you rebuild your Desktop with Macintosh Easy Open inactive, it will forever keep rebuilding the Desktop on its own, because it will be out of sync with its internal file records.

Suitcase II (version 2.14 and earlier) has a known incompatibility with PCI-bus Macs (7200, 7500, 8500, 9500). Upgrade to version 3.0, or alternative programs are Master Juggler 2.0 from Alsoft or Adobe Type Manager 4.0.
Normally, the problem manifests as you being able to load fonts with Suitcase as normal, but Adobe Type Manager doesn't find the Postscript font file and the Postscript font is not downloaded to the printer at print time, so you get blocky screen display and bitmapped printing.
One suggestion for a fix is to put all of the Postscript font files into System Folder:Fonts, and use Suitcase II only for enabling and disabling the screen fonts. Others have reported success on PCI Macs with 2.14p3 as opposed to 2.14 (this is not my experience, however). Another suggestion is to use Master Juggler - By the way, a copy of Master Juggler is included with the Corel Gallery II clip art package, which makes it a very good value.

Hanging at startup, or when opening Quark or Illustrator, or at print time is more typical of a corrupted type font. The reason it looks like Suitcase II or Master Juggler is the problem is that when Suitcase or Master Juggler are removed, the bad font no longer loads. Try this: re-install Suitcase from the original disks but Close all fonts in the Suitcase sets. Chances are, you won't hang. Now, it is a matter of elimination to identify, delete and re-install the bad font file(s) from the original font disks.

Other things to look out for:

• Sometimes, usually through user error, a Postscript font file (rather than screen font) gets added to a Suitcase set. You can identify these by their 5.3.3 naming convention (5 characters for the main font name, then 3 characters each for style names, no punctuation. Example: Garamond Bold Condensed = GaramBolCon) These will hang the machine; the fix is simply to delete them (Command -X) from Suitcase's font sets.

• The font files (screen and Postscript) are not allowed to be compressed. If you have DiskDoubler, AutoDoubler or SpaceSaver, check that the font files are not compressed, and that they are Excluded from any automatic compression routines.