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Charles Moore Reviews The O’Reilly Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide
If you use a Mac and are not well-versed in technical and troubleshooting issues, then you will probably find that O’Reilly and Associates’ new Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide by David Lerner and Aaron Freimark will repay its modest price many times over. Even Mac veterans like me will find this a worthwhile book to own. In the short time I had it in my possession, I’ve been referring to this handy little volume as my first reference for tech questions, and it usually tells me what I need to know. 
I was amazed at how much solid and useful information the authors have managed to pack into a mere 62 pages of body text plus a nine page index. There are 18 distinct troubleshooting categories addressed (see Appendix A), plus a three page promotion for Tekserve, Corp., where Lerner and Freimark work (Lerner is a founder), which the New York Times has called “the iconoclastic Macintosh repair store in New York City. Tekserve has also been called “The Epicenter of Mac Culture in NYC,” “the leader in Apple triage services,” “warm and eclectic -- maybe even a little eccentric,” and even “the world’s best Macintosh repair shop.” (See Appendix B below) When publisher Tim O’Reilly read the Times story about Tekserve, he approached David Lerner about authoring a “Mac Hardware In A Nutshell” book. Lerner said he didn’t have time to embark on a project like that, but he had recently written a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) guide to Mac troubleshooting that Tekserve distributes to its customers and posts on its Website. Mr. O’Reilly took a look, and realized that “like New York itself -- it was too good to leave just for the New Yorkers,” so “with the help of David Lerner and Aaron Freimark of Tekserve, we turned this FAQ sheet into the Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide.” Having read the book, I can see why Tim O’Reilly was so impressed. It’s not just the content, but also the style. Both are excellent. The advice Lerner and Freimark give is down-to-earth practical, and amazingly concise without rendering the information provided superficial and perfunctory. The first section is appropriately titled “Avoid going to your technician or consultant in a panic,” and that’s exactly what this book will be helpful in preventing, with seven clear steps to try first before picking up the phone or lugging your Mac off to the shop. Unsurprisingly, since it was based on a FAQ sheet, the book is structured in a question and answer format, which works for me. Here’s an example of how a particular topic is addressed:
Solid advice delivered with wry humor, which nicely captures the style and tone of this little manual. I also infer that Lerner and Freimark tend to share it many of my gripes and criticisms of Apple policy on a number of issues. For instance: “in 1997 Apple began the unfortunate practice of using the same designation for computers even after many internal and external modifications. There are nine models of iMac for example, each with different capabilities. . . “ Too true. There were three and a half distinct families of G3 Series PowerBooks, for example, plus a G3 PowerBook that wasn’t a G3 Series model. There have been four versions of the Titanium PowerBook, nine or 10 different iBook variants, and a bewildering gaggle of Power Mac G4 Towers (seven, according to this book). Maybe the prolific menagerie of numerical Mac and Performa model designations of the mid-90s was gratuitously confusing, but arguably no more so than the bewildering non-specificity of Mac model identification in the Jobs II era. I was amused to note that the Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide includes the formula for decoding Mac serial numbers to determine the date of manufacture, information that Apple has leaned on certain websites in the past to suppress as supposed “trade secrets.” The section on Crisis Situations tells you useful stuff like how to retrieve and save data after crashes or freezes, how to proceed if your Mac refuses to start up, or won’t respond to keyboard or mouse input, how to retrieve disks stuck in removable media drives, and advice on using third-party disk repair applications, including cautions about how they might make things worse. The next section deals specifically with Bombs and Crashes, with topics such as: “My computer locks when I launch my MajorSoft WordMangler program.” I applaud the authors’ tacit acknowledgment that not everyone is using a recent G4 with OS 10.2.3. OS 9 gets a lot of print in this book, and even OS 8 and System 7 rate frequent mention. I don’t always agree 100 percent with all of the advice. For example, they suggest that for anything more modest than a PowerPC 233 MHz with 64 MB of RAM, OS 8.1 is the system to use. That’s not a bad idea, but I’ve found that OS 8.6 works nicely on my daughter’s 117 MHz and 133 MHz PowerBooks 1400’s, with 40 MB and 64 MB of RAM respectively. The authors are not uncritical OS X cheerleaders either, noting that while “Mac OS X offers improved stability and reliability...frankly,OS. 9.2 is pretty stable too,” which mirrors my experience. On the question of “Should I upgrade to Mac OS X today?” the sensible reply is: “If you are a cautious person and your computer is doing everything you want it to, perhaps not. If you enjoy new things and like the new interface, but we just want to be au courant, then go for it. “ That said, there is a lot of helpful advice in here for coping with the transition to OS X in the Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide, which will prove a very helpful quick reference to keep alongside your computer as you travel down the OS X road. There are also sections on “Connecting Old Devices To New Macs,” and a concise but informative overview of issues related to SCSI, FireWire, and USB. The “Monitors and Displays” section contains one of the few illustrations in the book -- a diagram showing visually how to distinguish among the various video connectors Apple has used over the years. As a laptop specialist and aficionado, I was especially interested checking out the “PowerBooks and iBooks section, which I found to contain some useful, albeit substantially less than encyclopedic advice, including instructions for resetting the Power Manager Unit in any Mac laptop from the PowerBook 100 through the Titanium PowerBook and dual USB iBook. The first item in the “Communications, Internet, and AirPort” section could save you several times the price of the book come the next electrical storm. The authors note that “ whenever there is a big thunderstorm we see a number of Macs with dead modems come in for service the following days. We’ve also seen lightning through cable modems destroying Ethernet ports, requiring an extensive logic board repair...” Read and heed. Unplug your Mac and modem during electrical storms (another reason why laptops are superior to desktop machines -- you can keep on working on battery power during thunderstorms and through power outages). There are also concise instructions on how to connect your Mac to DSL or a cable modem in both OS 9 and OS X, a detailed tutorial on File Sharing, and a list of URLs of organizations to which you can donate surplus, working computers. The Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide is a great little book, well worth the modest $12.95 price. Within the circumscribed definition of a pocket guide, it’s hard to imagine how the Tekserve duo and O’Reilly Associates could have done a better job with it. Highly recommended, and a full, 5-A Applelinks rating.
Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide Appendix A Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide Table of Contents Foreword Introduction Index Appendix B More About Tekserve The New York Times - A Shop Where Fun Meets Function New York Daily News - Take it to the Mac New York Daily News - They don’t stew, they fix by Kenneth Li. New York Magazine - Computer Repair
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