Troubleshooting

Two unusual error messages that can occur during the attempted installation of Mac OS X El Capitan or Mac OS X Yosemite are the “This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading” error, or a “This copy of the Install … Read More

Some Mac users have discovered the Safari web browser has become significantly less stable after updating to some versions of Mac OS X system software including OS X El Capitan, OS X Yosemite, and MacOS Sierra. This can range from periodic crashes of Safari that never happened before, to Safari freezing up entirely, to Safari … Read More

Most problems with iPhone are fairly simple to explain and resolve, but a somewhat rare outlier is the case of the spontaneous continuously vibrating iPhone. You’ll know it if you encounter it, the iPhone will basically seize up and do nothing but vibrate with a black screen, and the vibrations aren’t even pulsed like a … Read More

Need to reset the entire printing system on a Mac? You can do that if you need to. Printer problems are notoriously frustrating for any computer user, and while Macs get off a bit easier than the alternatives out there, there can still be some pretty annoying issues that pop up with printing in Mac … Read More

In some unusual and admittedly rare situations, fonts in OS X and various Mac apps may display erroneously, or outright fail to display. Typically this happens after a font has been modified or a font has been installed outside of the standard ~/Library/Fonts directory, but it can happen out of the blue in some situations … Read More

Raise To Listen is a handy feature in modern versions of iOS that allow you to literally raise your iPhone to listen to a received audio message and to respond by sending a new voice text. But the feature is not entirely reliable for all users (particularly those who use an iPhone case, more on … Read More

Many iPhone users have noticed that Touch ID becomes finicky in cold weather, often not working at all when the temperatures drop in winter. Or at least, that’s what it seems like, but the real culprit is quite likely to be your skin and the effects of colder climates on fingerprints, which is what Touch … Read More

Some Mac users running OS X Yosemite have discovered Bluetooth to become unreliable, either dropping device connections constantly or even simply not discovering a working Bluetooth device. For example, some users who are trying to use a PS3 controller with the Mac in OS X Yosemite may find that the Mac is unable to locate … Read More

If you’ve ever gone to plug in your iPhone or iPad and noticed that it’s not charging as it’s supposed to be, you might want to check the devices Lightning port. That’s because the little charger port on the bottom can be a trap for pocket gunk, and even fairly small pieces of lint or … Read More

Forgetting the login and password to an Apple ID is not the best feeling in the world, particularly given how integral an Apple login is to the broader iOS and Mac OS X experience. So, if you or someone else happens to forget an Apple ID or the password to an Apple account, what should … Read More

Many iPhone users have discovered that since updating a few of the household phones to the latest versions of iOS, suddenly when one iPhone rings, so does another completely different iPhone with a different phone number. This is often the case with spouses and partners who find their iPhone ringing when their wife or husbands … Read More

In some rare situations, reinstalling OS X on a Mac may be required. This is made fairly easy as all modern Macs include the OS X Internet Recovery feature, which lets you reinstall OS X through a netboot type of mode that is accessed from the internet rather than a local drive. This is helpful … Read More

The iOS Health app can keep track of your movement, steps, and fitness throughout the day, and it works really great with the new iPhones… most of the time, at least. But sometimes you can open Health app and rather than seeing a chart of your fitness activity for that day, week, or month, you’ll … Read More

OS X Yosemite has a rather peculiar bug with Open and Save dialog windows, where the file selector or saver dialog window shows up as inappropriately large. Sometimes the Open / Save window gets so big that it goes underneath the users Dock or even off screen, effectively preventing the dialog window from being resized. … Read More

Many Mac users go with the full sized Apple wired keyboard rather than a wireless keyboard so that they can have a dedicated number keypad on their keyboard. Sometimes that numeric pad seems to randomly stop working though, and suddenly numbers don’t type at all, which can be frustrating to say the least. To further … Read More

Rarely, a Mac may encounter some peculiar issue during system boot that can cause quite a bit of panic, like booting to a completely black screen. It would be easy to interpret that as a potential hardware problem, and in some particularly rare situations that may be the case, but it’s more often a software … Read More

A number of Mac users who were experiencing wi-fi connection difficulties with OS X Yosemite have found the problems continue to persist after updating to OS X 10.10.1. The reasons for this are not entirely clear given that OS X 10.10.1 has aimed specifically at improving wi-fi reliability, but some of the traditional troubleshooting steps … Read More

Some Mac users who updated MacOS have found Mail app to experience errors or problems when trying to send email. Typically this is in the form of an SMTP server connection error, a mailbox that’s seemingly stuck offline, a repeated request for a password from Mail app (a fairly common issue which we’ve fixed before), … Read More