Troubleshooting applications - Mac OS Tutorial

- Are applications giving you problems on your Mac OS? Join us as we troubleshoot. - [Announcer] You're watching ITPro TV. (upbeat music) - Hello. Welcome back to ACSP Mac OS 11 Big Sur. I'm Zach and this is Don, and we're going to be doing some troubleshooting, getting in there, finding out what might be causing application software, hardware troubles, things like that. - Absolutely. You know, one of the old slogans of Apple was that it just works, and for the most part, it does. It's very easy to use operating system, but applications can sometimes break. So in this episode, we're going to learn a little bit about what that looks like, what are some of the problems the applications can cause, and then how do we troubleshoot it? How do we go and figure out which application is causing the problem? How do we get it to where, you know, maybe we can't even log in. How do we get to where we can log back in again, and see some of the really cool diagnostic tools and troubleshooting tools that are built right into Mac OS. - So what kind of problems can applications cause in our systems? - All right, there are a, it's almost better to do a list of like what can't they cause, right. - I was thinking that. - A crazy application can do all sorts of things, right? But you, you guys have heard this before. An end user complains about their computer. Their computer is being slow, right? Or their computer randomly reboots, or it locks up. They can see the screen, but they can't type or use their mouse or the most common one is the spinning pinwheel of death, right? - Oh, your beach ball - Where your mouse cursor changes into a little beach ball or whatever, you know, multi-color - I call it the beach ball of doom. - There we go. The, and nobody likes going to the beach. So you see that spinning and you know, the computer's working, you can tell because it's spinning, but it's not responsive. You can't launch applications. Maybe you can switch to another application and that one works, but the first application is broken. So these are problems that can happen. And from the end user's perspective, there's not a lot they can do. They can reboot their computer or they can just like force close an application. But the reality is there's a lot more that we can do as IT professionals and problems can go even further. What if it's not just one application crashing? What if I press power on the computer and it doesn't get to a login screen? Now I'm really stuck, right? Or I get to the login screen, but then it crashes before it gets to a desktop. Now I can't even interact with the applications. Those are problems that happen. And it's up to us to figure out exactly which application is causing the problem and get it out of the way. - Is there a way to tell if a problem is software or hardware related? - Good point, right? So I, I'm kind of focused on software cause we're troubleshooting applications, but hardware can cause a lot of the problems I just described, especially failing memory. So if you have RAM that's going bad in your system, they can cause practically everything that I've described in this episode. Well, we'll talk about troubleshooting hardware in another episode. But there's an easy way that we can quickly and easily test to see if this is hardware-related or software-related. When you power on your Mac, it runs through a whole boot process that we're going to cover a little bit later, but in brief, basically you're going to boot your operating system, and the operating system is going to load all of the apple-approved drivers and extensions. And then it's going to load third party drivers and extensions that we might have installed for any extra hardware that we might have. After that it's going to get to the login screen. And when you log in, it's going to load the apple-approved desktop and then all of the third party applications afterwards, right. So it kind of goes to these phases. Well, we can tell the MAC to just boot up with the apple approved software, take all our third party software out of the mix, right. And what we're doing there is what's called safe mode. So let me show you an example of that. We'll take a look at, at my device here. So this is my computer. I've got it set up. I'm logged in as Don Pezed. The computer's working fine, right. But when you fire up your MAC and log in, you might have it set to Launch Applications Automatically. Some of the applications you install might do that as well. If you go into System Preferences and in your System preferences go into the User Accounts, the Users and Groups right here. You can take a look at your User Account and on your User Account, you have Login Items. These are programs that might be starting when you log in. So every time you log in, these programs are going to run. If one of them is bad, what's going to to happen? Well, it's going to go bad every time you try and log in. So when we boot into safe mode, we're telling the system, hey, I want to log in, but don't run any of this stuff. Don't load that third party software or whatever. All right, now, there are times we have other software installed, like I've got Splashtop Streamer installed up here. I can see it running. I've got the little logo up here in my bar. That's running every time I log in, but it doesn't show up here. And that's because it's installed a system extension. So those start up as part of the operating systems, It's a little bit different, and that's because it helps to share my screen, even when I'm not logged in. Now, if I want to not load the Login Items, the way we do that is we log out, or if you haven't been able to log in in the first place then it doesn't really matter, but I'm going to log out. And when you go to log in, what you normally do is you click on your picture and you type in your password, well, whenever it shows up. So you click on your picture and you type in your password and then you press Enter or you click the arrow, right. Well, I'm going to click on my picture. I'm going to type my password. And instead of pressing just Enter by itself, I'm going to hold Shift on my keyboard. So I'm holding down that Shift button right now and I'm going to click the arrow to log in. What I'm telling it now is to do a Safe Mode login. It's going to load my user account and the official apple software, and it's not going to load third party software. Look up here at my status bar. I don't see Splashtop anymore. It loaded without that, right. So I came in, and so now, if it had been one of those programs, I would know it. I would say, "oh, it was one of those programs that stopped me from being able to log in." Now I can go and troubleshoot, probably not hardware at this point because everything else is fine. So Safe Mode is a quick and easy way to do that. I just held Shift down while logging in. - Well if that works, how do we find out which piece of software is causing the problem or the cause of the problem. - All right, well this is where it comes into a little bit of work, right? What you would do now is, oh, actually, you know what? I lied, Splashtop came up just late. So it is a system extension. We'll deal with that in a different way here in just a few minutes in this episode. But if it was an application that you know, was causing the problem, then what I would do is I would go into my start-up items, that screen I showed you a moment ago. So I'm going to go back to System Preferences and go to Users and Groups and find My User and go to Login Items right here. And I would check just one of them. Check it off to say, yes, I want to run this, just one. Log out, log back in. Okay, is the problem there? Then it was that program. Is the problem not there? Okay, then I would come in here and I would check another one. And just one by one, you go through and check each one until the problem comes back. And when the problem comes back, now you've found the application that caused it. So pretty easy to see that right through here, just going and checking one by one. It can take a little time, you know, hopefully people don't have more than five or six applications in here. I've seen people with as many as 10. If they have 20, that's way too much stuff to be starting up when you log in. Do you really need all that stuff? So you've got to kind of evaluate that and just choose the items that you want. And you would see check boxes here on the left side. Like if I add, here I'll add something to it. If I wanted, say, I don't know, Safari or Automator or something like that, the Calculator, every time I log in, I want the calculator to run, which I'm having a hard time clicking on. Then, there it goes, it shows up in the list, right. And so you can take them and you can just remove them out and then add them back in one by one and then see that. There is a hide option here, which just means that it's going to hide it. It will run it when you log in, but it'll minimize it down to the dock at the bottom. That's not the same, it's still running, right. So you really need to remove that. But once that's done, then you're able to test it out one by one, until you find the one you need. - But what if we can't even get into the login screen? - All right, let's go back to Splashtop. So Splashtop up here, this guy loaded because it's a system extension, okay. And it's a system extension, it's going to load prior to the login screen, right? The little user tool here loaded later, but the actual service is running in the background and those system extensions can be a lot more tricky because the kernel is feeding into them and actually loading that information in. So that can prevent you from even getting to a login screen in the first place. That really limits our availability. Well, when I showed you with Safe Mode and with Safe Mode, I held Shift while logging in, but you can actually do what's called a safe boot where you hold down Shift when you boot up and that's going to stop it from loading third-party applications, third party extensions. It's really going to cut you down to just the apple stuff, just the Mac OS stuff, and really get that boiled down. So if we want to see what that looks like, what we can so is, well here, I'll just take my system. I'm going to shut down, and we'll let that shut down. And then I'll hold the Shift key on my keyboard while I press the power button on the Mac. And then I'm just going to hold the Shift key down until I get to the login screen. That's going to put me in the safe boot mode. So there we go, so I'm off now, I'm going to hold Shift on my keyboard, press that power button, and then we're going to wait impatiently as it goes through its process. But you've got to hold that Shift key down for a little while. I see my apple menu coming up. And so now it's going through the boot. Keep holding down Shift until you get to the login screen and you can do safe boot and safe mode, if you just keep holding Shift while you log in, well not while you type your password, cause then it'll be all capital, but then you get logged in and you're able to go from there. So not much different, and this is the same thing. This would remove those third-party drivers and then allow us to get in and hopefully be able to log in and function. And it's hard to see. I'm going to let go of Shift now, but up at the top right of my screen in really tiny letters, can I zoom? It won't let me zoom So, zoom feature has been turned off for me, but way up here in little tiny red letters, it says safe boot. So it's telling me that I booted into this safe boot mode so that I'm aware of it and it's not loading those third-party extensions. - So, do we just stable our hardware, and then re-enable it one by one, like we did with the hardware? - Oh, I wish you could do that. (both laughing) - I meant software, you know I mean that. - With the software, it was easy, right. We just went into our Users and Groups, we removed them, right from there, that's easy. Hardware is more difficult, right. So the kernel extensions are actually files that are copied to the hard drive and they're going to be loaded and, that's it, they're either all loaded or they're not loaded at all. So instead, what I recommend when it's hardware is you do something a little bit different, right? If my system is locking up or crashing before I get to the login screen, right. I need to see what was the last thing the system tried to do before it crashed. Well, it won't tell you normally, right. When I booted up, what did I see? I saw an apple and a little bar went across and then a login screen, that's it, right. But there's actually a lot happening behind the scenes. And you can tell your Mac to show you that. I'm going to shut down again. So let me just come even here and I'll hit shut down. So it's going to power off. And this time when I boot, I'm going to hold on my keyboard Command V Command and the letter V. V is short for verbose. This is going to tell it to do a verbose boot up. And when I do this boot, it's going to look a little weird because I can't zoom in on it. So it's going to be small, but you're going to see a lot of text running down the screen. - There it goes. - There it goes, this is all hidden from normal users. You don't get to see this stuff, right. But if it's a hardware extension that's causing the problem, basically you watch this text go along and when it stops, whatever's the last thing on the screen was your problem, right. So you can quickly and easily find it. So if it's a particular driver, I would know. Now a lot of this stuff that it's loading up here is normal official apple stuff. But your third-party drivers, as you install them will show up. If you have a Wacom tablet, if you've loaded, like the Splashtop software, like I have, those will show up as kernel extensions, you'll see it there, and then you can go and uninstall or remove the driver that was causing the problem. - Are there any other special boot modes we should know about, like Doc Martin boots, I love them? (Don laughs) - So there are a couple, I'll tell you, safe boot and safe mode and verbose mode, those three right there, If you know them, that's pretty much all you need to figure out which program or which driver is causing your problem. There is a special mode you can boot too called Single User Mode. This is if things have really gone wrong, it's a special Unix type boot mode that gets you into the command line so you can try and correct things. Honestly, if you're at a point where you need that, usually it's just better to re-install Mac OS or restore from a time machine back up, right, like things have really gone off the rails. But if you want to boot into that mode, I did command V for verbose mode. You would do command S for single user mode. Some people think the S stands for shell. And that's because it does take you to a Unix shell basically once it boots up, but it is single user mode. So that's a special Unix mode we're able to get in. You can access the file system. So potentially you could go in and delete the kernel extension filed or to remove it. But otherwise it's a, it's just a shell. And so you're able to try and recover from there. - Was there anything else we needed to watch out for when troubleshooting applications, Don? - You know, sometimes it's not so much the application's fault that it's failing, but some of the other things that we're running on our system, and I'll give you an example of that. Apple is pretty aggressive with keeping their Macs energy efficient. So by default, they go to sleep. When they're idle, the hard drives will go to sleep. And they do interesting things like while the Mac is asleep, occasionally it will wake up and check for new email and check for new iMessage type things. And, but the monitor won't wake up. You won't actually see that it does. It just kind of does it hidden in the background. Not every application plays nice with that, all right. So let me show you some settings here. I'm going to go into my System Preferences. So I'm, I'm rebooted now back in normal mode, so not in a safe boot or safe mode or anything. And back here in my System Preferences, I'm going to go to energy saver. And in the energy saver settings, you'll see a number of different options in here. And yours will probably be set different than mine. I've got mine set because I don't want it to go to sleep while we're here on the show, but you'll see things like Wait for network access. That keeps the network adapter alive even while it's asleep. That's not usually going to mess with your applications, but this option right here, Power Nap, Power Nap is the one where MAC OS is asleep. It partially wakes up to check for email and other things and then goes back to sleep again, that can freak out some applications. Some don't play well with that. So you might choose to turn that option off. You can even turn off sleep altogether. You can have your monitor go off, but keep the system awake by preventing the computer from going to sleep. That might solve problems if you have applications that just aren't designed to be able to do that. Most applications these days are, so it would have to be like a really old application, but that is one more thing that might cause a problem. - Fantastic, great information. I feel better about troubleshooting applications now, I really do. Before we move on though, last word, sir. - We are going to revisit a few more topics on this. For example, there are system logs that give you a ton of information on applications too, but I just wanted to run through some of the basic steps that I use in the field that will solve most of the problems when troubleshooting applications. - Good stuff, and thanks again. And thanks again for joining us for this episode of ACSP MAC OS 11. We will see you again soon, bye-bye. - [Announcer] Thank you for watching IT Pro TV.