Entries tagged with “troubleshooting” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.

In recent months, my MacBook has occasionally slowed down to a sleepy snail's crawl: applications would respond with a major lag, switching between applications would take a few seconds, and the time for launching another application -- including Activity Monitor for hunting down the culprit -- could be measured in minutes. I still have not found a general root cause for this behavior yet, but force-shutting down and rebooting would always get the machine back to its proper performance without any further problems. The last time I had to apply this remedy, though, I could no longer log into my main user account after the machine had rebooted. And this was just minutes after I had left Phil Schiller's keynote, looking at a full week of Macworld Expo '09 still ahead of me. Bad timing, really bad timing...