Downloading Mavericks killed Safari!

I downloaded Mavericks and everything was fine, however, when I came to set up my iPad it was not recognised. I then decided to set it up via iTunes, which was partially successful in that the iPad is workable but won’t sync both ways, but it has been a disaster as far the computer is concerned. I cannot open Safari nor many of my other Apple apps. I get an error message – sometimes it’s -1721, other times it’s -604. Help! Joan Fraser

Well firstly, setting up your iPad through iTunes is the correct and normal way to do things. Mavericks doesn’t ‘recognise’ your iPad by listing it as a device in Finder so don’t worry. Apple intends for you to use iTunes for that.

Now, those error messages: I’m going to come clean here and say I don’t know what they mean. My best Googling has only turned up references to error codes from OS 9 and that can’t be right. But I think the safest working hypothesis for now is to assume that your Mavericks install didn’t complete correctly, for whatever reason. Assuming that this was a one-off glitch, and there’s nothing wrong with your Mac hardware, this is easy to fix. Reboot with ç+R held down to restart in Recovery Mode. You see a grey desktop with a Mac OS X Utilities window in the middle of the screen. Check the Wi-Fi icon in the top-right to make sure you’re connected to the internet, click Reinstall Mac OS X and follow the instructions.