Updated for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion!

We may love our Macs, but they can still suffer from significant problems. In the second edition of this essential guide from best-selling author Joe Kissell, you'll learn 17 basic troubleshooting procedures and how to solve 15 common problems, along with an easy-to-follow way to troubleshoot novel problems. Whether your Mac won't turn on, experiences kernel panics repeatedly, or won't print or connect to the Internet, this book has the calm, friendly advice you need to find a solution.

This ebook contains a lot of information for $10. Seriously, I thought it would be much lighter than it was. It's actually pretty much indispensable. Well done, Joe Kissell and Take Control, I say. —Mark Webster in his mac.nz book review

The 17 basic troubleshooting procedures (along with the reasons why they can help) you'll learn are:

• Restart your Mac
• Force-quit an application
• Start up from another volume
• Run disk-repair utilities
• Erase and restore from backup
• Repair permissions
• Start up in safe mode
• Turn off login items
• Check preference files
• Reset PMU, SMU, SMC, NVRAM, or PRAM
• Use Activity Monitor
• Check free disk space
• Check log files
• Clear caches
• Check your RAM
• Test for reproducibility
• Get system information

Joe also explains how to solve 15 common problems, including:

• Your computer won't turn on
• Your computer keeps turning itself off
• You experience repeated kernel panics
• Your Mac is abnormally slow
• You can't empty the Trash
• An application grinds to a halt
• An application crashes
• The keyboard or mouse doesn't work
• You lose your Internet connection
• Printing doesn't work
• Spotlight searches fail
• Keychain (seemingly) forgets passwords
• Apple Mail fails to connect
• Time Machine misbehaves
• A volume won't unmount