AAUG Reviews

by Mike Burns, AAUG Member

Sixteen checklists. That’s how many I found in this really useful ebook. I have used Macs for two decades now but I do not have a lot of technical knowledge of hardware and operating systems. I do email, internet, word processing, spreadsheets and pictures. For someone like me, this book is a wonderful thing to have. It presents a logical, easy to understand system of dealing with the inevitable problems that will arise. I have had problems before and I have spent days trying to fix them. Usually I have ended up calling an Applecare assistant and had them walk me through the steps needed. This book lays out those steps for you in a logical format that you can understand. I believe I can now fix most of the common problems that I have had in the past.

Probably the best part of the book for me is preparing for an emergency and preventing problems before they happen. Setting a routine backup schedule, acquiring a secondary startup volume and establishing another user account on the computer are essential things to do before a real emergency arises. Other preparation techniques are also listed. Some are very obvious and some are not (at least to me). I have an old Powerbook with Tiger and an iMac with Leopard. I got rid of unneeded files and applications on my laptop and it seemed to perk up its performance.

The book goes into some basic fix-it procedures that would be common for anyone. From that it addresses common problems and then goes beyond to more extreme situations. It does not attempt to catalog every issue you will face but instead tries to establish a systematic protocol that you would automatically go into. I liked this approach. I think it would help me keep the panic level down when something bad happens. If you have ever had an application crash, the computer won’t turn on, it becomes very slow, you can’t empty the trash or even some of the peripherals like the mouse or the printer won’t work; then you too have had one of those panic moments. There is a checklist and guide here for every one of those problems and much more.

This book was written before Leopard came out and therefore I am not sure if all the recommended solutions would work. Since we are now in the realm of Intel chips in Mac computers, there is a basis for my doubt. Having said that, I believe that probably all the processes outlined here would work on a Leopard OS. But I am not sure and since I did not want to induce a crash in my iMac to find out, I will have to wait for the next version of this book to find out. Yes, I would buy the new version of this and I would recommend this one also to those Mac people like me. There is one more important thing to bring up. This is an ebook with critical information that you would need if you Mac crashes. You really need to have it in another handy format like a flashdrive, spare disk, another computer or even printed on paper. When you need this info, you are really, really going to need it.