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hardware test

Did that Mac just restart itself? About kernel panics

What they are, how they’ve changed, how to work out what went wrong, and how to deal with them. No Mac should ever experience a single panic.

November 27, 2019 Macs, Technology

Hardware diagnostics

How to check your Mac’s hardware, interpret the results, deal with problems, and tackle tricky intermittent faults.

September 23, 2019 Macs, Technology

Diagnosing diagnostics and Apple Hardware Test

What should you do when you try to restart in Diagnostics Mode and can’t? And how to check and restore a Recovery partition.

March 12, 2019 Macs, Technology

Before boot.efi: the Mac’s initial self-test routines

What happens in your Mac when you press the Power button? Before it loads the EFI firmware, it goes through self-testing, and initialising key chips.

August 8, 2018 Macs, Technology

Pick your Panacea: how to select a generic fix

When should you reset your SMC and NVRAM, repair permissions, install a Combo update, or re-install the whole of macOS?

March 9, 2018 Macs, Technology

Sleep, Wake, and Startup: Hardware and ACPI

Shutdown cause codes, wake reasons, ACPI, and sleep states – diagnosing problems from hardware events.

August 8, 2017 Macs, Technology

Check your Mac with hardware diagnostics or AHT

How to run Apple’s diagnostic software to work out whether your Mac has a hardware fault – and how to interpret its error codes.

March 22, 2017 Macs, Technology

Checking your drives with DriveDx

T T Read More

How much is the data stored on your Mac’s drives worth? DriveDx is a utility which could save you from that loss.

March 3, 2016 Macs, Technology

Reviving the hopeless Mac: what to try before visiting the Genius Bar

What to do when your Mac won’t start up, and is acting dead, or at least mortally wounded.

December 14, 2015 Macs, Technology
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