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Introduction to Mac Repair 3 - Advanced Maintenance Options

Read previous part: Introduction to Mac Repair 2 - Using Technical Specifications to Advantage

In this entry Eli highlights the issues of software updates for Mac computers and describes peculiarities of Mac’s Finder, Activity Monitor and Disk Utility.

Now, the next thing to look at is, since you know about web guides, know how to look for warranty, specification, of course, with all the computers one thing that you need to do is updates. This is very big. We all think for some reason that Microsoft is an evil villain of updates, and other operating systems are not that bad.

Updating Mac
Screenshot 13. Updating Mac

 

Apple Macs are horrible for this. They have lots and lots and lots of updates. So, if you have a problem with your Mac, all you need to do is to go to your Apple, go click Software Update… as shown at the Screenshot 13, and that will go and check for software updates, which it requires a lot.

Whereas Microsoft comes up with updates once a week, Apple comes up with quite a few updates, too, so you should go to the website and take a look at the updates. Once we have looked at the basic characteristics of the computer, we have looked how to fix hardware, the next thing to do is to go and look at Finder as shown on Screenshot 14.

Mac’s Finder (in the bottom left-hand corner)
Screenshot 14. Mac’s Finder (in the bottom left-hand corner)

 

Finder is just like in Windows the Explorer. That is a files exploration utility. This is always an icon of these little bizarre smiling faces. As you open this up, this gives you all the files and folders important for your computer: All My Files, Airdrop, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies and so on and so forth (Screenshot 15).

Mac Finder expanded
Screenshot 15. Mac Finder expanded

 

If we worry about the date of repair we need to go to the Applications folder.

This shows you all the applications installed on this PC. So, one of the places that we need to go and take a look is the Utilities folder (Screenshot 16).

Mac Utilities folder
Screenshot 16. Mac Utilities folder

 

Utilities folder has lots of utilities for the Mac. Two utilities we are to look at are these Activity Monitor and Disk Utility.

Mac Activity Monitor
Screenshot 17. Mac Activity Monitor

 

Basically, I just double-click on the Activity Monitor, which is just like Task Manager in Windows. Here (Screenshot 17) we can see how much CPU is being used, how much memory is being used, we can see disk activities, disk usage and network usage, so basically this a Task Manager of Mac world.

So, if you have a Mac type computer that runs slowly, or things are kind of locking up, this is where you go to see if it is using too many resources.

The next thing that we need to go is Disk Utility (Screenshot 19). This you use to make sure your hard drives and partitions are healthy. So, I have this one 121.33 GB Apple SSD TS hard drive, divided into two partitions, Macintosh hard drive and Boot Camp partitions.

Mac Disk Utility
Screenshot 18. Mac Disk Utility

 

All you have to do for repair is you highlight a hard drive you want to deal with, and that will give you options down here on the bottom of the screen. You thus can verify Disk Permissions, verify Repair Disk Permissions, if you deal with permissions you may not be allowed to do these things.

But there is a big thing on the right-hand side (Screenshot 19).

Mac Verify Disk and Repair Disk options
Screenshot 19. Mac Verify Disk and Repair Disk options

 

This is like a Scan Disk utility for Mac computer, so if you are having some weird odd problems, click on the Verify Disk, it will go through and check for any problems on the hard drive, and whatever problems you have, it will repair these.

There are other options on this tab, there are Aid, Erase, RAID and Restore, but basically the main thing here is that on First Aid tab (as shown on Screenshot 19) you do Verify Disk and Repair Disk.

If you are having problems that require double click files, but for some reason they do not open, they may become corrupted. I have seen this a lot on Macs, if you have corrupted files, you go here and make Verify Disk and Repair Disk.

Read next part: Introduction to Mac Repair 4 - System Preferences, Network Settings and Basic Precautions

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