Solving Program Problems

Almost everything you do on MacBook Air requires a program, so you can’t do much if one refuses to run, either because it crashes or refuses to open in the first place. The next couple of sections offer some solutions to these program woes.

A program crashes

One of the more frustrating Mac experiences is to be merrily working away in an application when, out of the blue, the program simply disappears from the screen. Apple says that the application “quit unexpectedly,” but the rest of us call this a good old-fashioned program crash.

When an application crashes, you usually see a dialog like the one shown in Figure 12.7. Click Relaunch to get MacBook Air to restart the application for you. In most cases, the program picks itself up, dusts itself off, and resumes working as though nothing bad had happened.

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12.7 This dialog appears when an application goes up in flames.

However, you may find that the program goes down for the count yet again. In this case, you see the dialog shown in Figure 12.8. Click Reset and relaunch.

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12.8 This dialog appears when an application crashes a second time.

At this point in the proceedings, MacBook Air assumes that a corrupt preferences file is causing the problem. So when you click Reset and relaunch, MacBook Air does three ...

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