From time to time, things can go wrong inside your Mac. Most of the time the consequences of this are (relatively) minor. The first thing you might notice is the application you are using (Safari, Mail or something else) will crash. When this happens the window you are working in will suddenly disappear and be replaced by a message from your Mac saying that the application (whatever) has unexpectedly quit. Sadly you will probably have lost any unsaved work at this point, although some applications have the ability to save work as they crash, minimising the loss experienced.
OS X has been specifically developed to by tolerant of these application crashes. Most of the time the rest of your computer will continue to function normally. You can simply restart your application and carry on. repeated application crashes may point to a problem with that particular application that may need to be addressed by either reinstalling the app, deleting the associated application preference file or obtaining an update of the application from the company's web site.
Occasionally something worse happens. The first symptom of this may be that your cursor freezes. Your Mac may become totally unresponsive. This sort of system wide freeze is quite rare but it does happen. In such cases your only option may be to restart the Mac, normally by holding the power button down for around 10 seconds or for however long it takes to restart the machine. On very rare occasions you may need to remove the power lead from your Mac, although this should be avoided as it can damage components inside your Mac. If you suffer from repeated freezes there may be something more fundamental wrong with your Mac, such as corruption to the system or on the hard drive. You should take action to resolve these freezes as soon as possible since system lock ups can render the whole OS unstable leading to greater and greater problems.
The grand daddy of all Mac crashes is the kernel panic. This event is rare but it does happen. In such cases your Macs screen will dim and a grey "curtain" effect will scroll down the screen, accompanied by a grey box with writing in several languages informing you that your Mac needs a restart. Kernel Panics are caused by low level failure in the OS or in your hardware. They indicate that there are fundamental problems with your OS or your machine. Modern Macs are very picky about the type and quality or RAM they use, and the majority of kernel panics are caused by bad RAM. In such cases the RAM should be replaced with high quality RAM. Low quality, unbranded RAM can cause more problems than it solves. Kernel Panics can also be caused by failures of other components such as hard drives, logic boards or firewire ports. You may need to reinstall your OS from scratch in order to overcome persistent kernel panics, or you may need to replace defective components. In any case, kernel panics (particularly if the occur regularly) are a signal that you need to fix something important. If you start to suffer from kernel panics you should ensure that your data is backed up a quickly as possible. Just in case.
If your Mac is crashing, for whatever reason, it can become annoying, as well as disruptive to productivity. If you feel you need help addressing any of these issues then call me. I'm happy to help.
