Easy five-minute fixes

So something’s wrong – your Mac’s playing up. But don’t pull your hair out just yet, because many of your Mac’s most vexatious problems can be solved in just a few minutes using just these simple steps. Don’t work through them chronologically – just do wh

Turn it off and on

“Have you tried turning it and on again?” was a running joke in the popular sitcom The IT Crowd. It sounds silly, but it’s got a grain of truth to it. Often, happily, it simply works. If you’re having any unexpected behaviour from your Mac, the first port of call is always to try to restart it.

To be fair, many applications and core operating system processes are sandboxed: that is to say, they’re compartmentalised from each other in such a way that if one stops working, other apps in operation shouldn’t suffer.

But there are still occasional problems that can cause an application to stop working all together. Some underlying issues with the operating system or with your Mac’s ability to communicate can stop applications from working correctly.

Once you’ve saved any open documents and quit out of open applications, click on the Apple menu and select Restart, and then wait for the Mac to reboot and try again. If selecting Restart fails, you can hold down and and then press the Power button to force your Mac to restart. On some Mac keyboards, the and

keys will work instead. You should bear in mind that forcing your Mac to restart without saving open documents will cause your unsaved data to be lost, so please try saving if you’re in the middle of doing something before trying this method.

Simplify your setup by disconnecting peripherals

Restart didn’t work? Try disconnecting any external connected peripherals. If you have a printer, external hard disk, USB thumbdrive or any other device that isn’t necessary to the basic operation of your Mac, now is the time to properly shut them down and disconnect them by removing their cables from your Mac.

It’s also a good idea to disconnect any Bluetooth peripherals you’ve paired. Just turn Bluetooth off – which you can do in one click if you see the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar; otherwise open the Bluetooth pane of System Preferences and turn Bluetooth off.

By the end of this, the only things that should be connected to your Mac are those absolutely essential to its operation. If you’re using a laptop, that means there shouldn’t be anything connected. If you’re using a desktop Mac, pare it down to the bare essentials: display, keyboard and mouse.

If the problem goes away, start reconnecting your peripherals one by one and see if the problem starts again to discover the culprit.

Resetting NVRAM

Some unusual Mac behaviour can be attributed to a corruption of Nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM). If your speaker stops working, if your Mac shows you a question mark when you first turn it on or if your cursor stops responding, that may indicate the NVRAM needs to be reset. Resetting it isn’t dangerous; the Mac will reload the information in needs.

You can reset the NVRAM by holding down ç, å, P and all together as soon as the Mac boots. The screen will go black and you’ll hear the Mac’s startup chime again. Continue holding those keys down until you hear the chime twice more, then let them go, and you’re done.

Resetting the SMC

Safe Mode

Safe Mode is a way to force your Mac to perform certain checks before it starts; it also prevents some software from automatically loading or opening. It can be a handy way to figure out if some software you’ve installed is a troublemaker.

To start in Safe Mode, hold down when your Mac starts up, after you hear the startup tone. You can release

after you see the grey Apple logo appear. Safe Mode will only load the software OS X requires to work. If you’ve installed third-party kernel extensions, fonts, startup items and login items, all of those will be deactivated while in Safe Mode.