A bad computer day—readers inquire

Readers have emailed me lamenting their computer issues after reading A Bad computer day. I responded with the best advice I could give, based on many years of professional experience. Good luck to them, and everyone else who might be suffering from inexplicable problems.

A friend of mine asks:

“My question is...what do poor normal people (like me) do when all that $@()* happens to them!”

Good question! This is one reason to make it someone else’s problem, or at least try to—purchase a support plan such as AppleCare (Mac) or the equivalent if it’s (yuck) a Windows PC.

Here are some diglloyd.com resources related to computer perplexities:

Error Correcting Code Memory
Uninterruptible Power Supplies
PowerMac Quad Sleep Problems
PowerMac G5 Quad Setup
DiskTester
diglloydTools

If your browser (eg Safari) doesn’t take you to the right place for the above links, look for the date in the URL at the top of the browser window, or use Firefox 1.5 (I use both it and Safari).

Summary of approach to problem solving computer freezes, etc.

• Is it bad memory? Buy only OEM quality memory, ECC memory if your computer supports it.
• Consider an uninterruptible power supply, to ensure clean power to your Mac and the drives.
• Install a fresh system on a newly formatted disk. This could be a Firewire drive or a spare internal drive. Boot off this drive and see if the problems recur.
• Never put data on the boot disk. I dedicate an external firewire drive for the boot drive so that I can use the internal drives for data (only). I even make a symbolic link in my home directory for Mail to my data volume, so that I can pretty much wipe the boot drive at my pleasure. If an extra disk (< $200) is beyond your budget, then partition the boot drive into a “Boot” and a “Data” partition. These can be erased independently.
• Be sure to run Mac OS X Disk Utility to check that the volumes are good, and use “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” when formatting a disk.
• Don’t install programs that require drivers or other specialty software that can destabilize the Mac OS X kernel. This includes screen savers and anti-virus (for Mac, PC users must use anti-virus). Someone will disagree on the anti-virus, but FUD is the rule for anti-virus vendors.
• Test for reliability before putting a new RAID or disk into production use.