Customer Reviews

Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide for Mac OS

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The Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide is a great little book. It is informative. It is for OS 9 and OS X. It's small size is useful and convenient to carry it around with you and your laptop. It's small size, also, makes it undaunting for those who don't particularly like to read. Finally, it has a nice, question and short answer, format to it.

Here are a couple of questions/problems in the book for example; "A disk is stuck in my Mac." My Mac froze up. Now what?" I just spilled beer/tea/coffee/syrup on my keyboard." It then goes on to give a short answer to your problem.

The information ranges from problems such as these, to basic computer questions such as "What is Firewire Target Mode?" "How do I turn on File Sharing?" and "How do I clean my screen?"

At $12.95 it is a great book to have around whether you're a beginner or more experienced. If you are a beginner you can read it from cover to cover in order to learn more about your computer.

If you're more experienced it is a great reference to have around if you can't quite remember something or that certain key combination. Finally if you don't like to read, this is the book for you because it is about a centimeter thick instead of an inch or two thick, yet is surprisingly packed with good useful information.

Tony Moore - Michigan Apple User Group

Two things about this book: Firstly it is actually a reprint of a FAQ that is available for download or viewing on a website, and secondly unless you actually have a problem it's quite hard to tell wether or not it will help. I have had a couple of the problems that are mentioned in this book and their advice is spot on so it may be safe to assume that they do actually know what they are talking about with regards to other problems. Books such as this are quite hard to rate as problems come up infrequently and each problem seems to have it's own unique features so a general guide may only get you out of trouble fifty percent of the time. That said this company is quite legendary when it comes to fixing Mac's so the book certainly has potential to be helpful if you do encounter standard problems. It would also save you hunting around for that A4 printout of the FAQ and it's quite a nice pocket sized reference book and a high quality printing.
If you want a hard copy and aren't able to print this off the website then certainly buy this book.

I got this book in a Kindle edition - and the Kindle isn't really the device to use for a quick reference. Some of the formatting on key sequences and so on aren't even laid out correctly with the multiple keys on different lines.
In addition, the material in the book is much more OS9 than OS X. I really don't think help on updating from OS 8.6 to OS 9 is the kind of problem I expect to run into anytime soon.
I read through it when I got it and didn't see anything really worthwhile. I haven't opened it since.
I expect a lot more from O'Reilly books than I got from this one.