Troubleshooting

In Apple's Mail program, when you add an e-mail account you can specify a full name to associate with it, which will be used instead of the account's log-in name or address when sending or receiving messages, and which can make various To and From fields a bit easier to make sense of. While this option is convenient, with Apple's new iCloud service you may find your display name has been changed to your account name or another alias with no apparent way to change it.

If you go to the Accounts section of your Mail preferences, … Read more

Underneath its slick interface, OS X has a number of hidden configuration files that contain the settings for default and standard behaviors. While in most cases these files being hidden is good for system stability and security, sometimes you may need to access one for troubleshooting purposes or to apply small customizations to the system.

Often these files can be accessed with simple one-line Terminal commands, as is commonly seen with the "defaults" command for editing program or service property lists; however, at other times you might need to make more extensive edits to a settings file. When … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions regarding an odd APSD-related firewall error in OS X, the utility and risks of having Java runtimes installed, options for maintaining Mountain Lion on corporate networks, and MacBook battery charging. We welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Best practices to prolong battery life MacFixIt reader Jonathan asks:

OS X will automatically attempt to mount an attached volume when the system is started, and if successful the volume will appear in the Finder either in the sidebar or on your desktop if you have these options enabled. However, there may be instances such as in multi-boot environments when you might want a specific volume to remain unmounted.

With multiple boot volumes in a system, when loaded in one operating system it is relatively easy to access and edit important files on the boot disk of other operating systems. Therefore, keeping the unused boot drive unmounted may be a … Read more

Yesterday a new open-source project was posted on GitHub that contains the source code for a utility to scour a Mac system's memory and list the entire contents of a targeted keychain. While this utility may raise some concern and its approach potentially be used for malicious activities, its abilities do not arise from a vulnerability in OS X.

The utility is a small C program called keychaindump that, with administrative privileges, will scan the system's active memory for the wrapper and master keys to unlock a targeted keychain file; however, the utility will work only on keychains … Read more

Apple has released a security update for the Apple-supported Java runtime for OS X, which many users have installed on their systems. Java for OS X is available for Apple's latest three OS X releases starting with Snow Leopard. The update should be available through Apple's Software Update service (in the Apple menu).

This update was released by Oracle last week to tackle a few outstanding vulnerabilities (separate from those recently found in its latest Java 7 runtime), but since Java 6 for OS X is maintained and distributed by Apple, OS X users have had to wait … Read more

Memory management in OS X is done primarily by the operating system's virtual memory system; however, there are a few approaches you can take to force the system to clear some aspects of its memory structure and free it up either for troubleshooting purposes or to perhaps help performance.

Part of the memory system in OS X is a cache, where recently used program information is stored so the system can more swiftly launch the program if needed. If you open the Activity Monitor utility in OS X and view the System Memory section, you will see this cache … Read more

Parallels Desktop 8 has been made available for public purchase, offering faster graphics and improved startup and resume times over previous versions. If you need to run Windows or any other operating system on your Mac, then while dual booting is arguably the fastest and most stable option for executing code, another approach that perhaps has more utility is virtualization, where you can open a window to the hardware on your system and allow a second operating system to run simultaneously.

In the past week, the developers for the top two commercial virtualization programs for OS X (VMWare Fusion and … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions regarding an odd apsd-related firewall error in OS X, the utility and risks of having Java Runtimes installed, options for maintaining Mountain Lion on corporate networks, and running MacBooks on a dead battery that will not charge. We welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: apsd firewall error in OS X MacFixIt reader Clem asks: