We reveal some of the scariest, most common Mac problems and show you how to solve them

Are you experiencing problems with your Mac? If so, don’t be scared and freak out because there may be a quick and easy way to solve the problem. Over the following pages, we cover the most common problems that people experience with their Macs and outline possible solutions to fix them. Of course, nothing is 100 per cent guaranteed to work perfectly, and you may have to try multiple work-throughs to solve a particular issue, but hopefully we have all of the possible solutions outlined here in some shape or form.

Before you do anything, though, try working through the quick-fix solutions on the right, as often something as simple as restarting your Mac can resolve certain problems, especially if you aren’t in the habit of doing so. Not having hundreds of apps open at the same time can also improve the responsiveness, as every process can have an impact on your Mac’s processing speed. Hopefully, with our help you can get your treasured computer firing on all cylinders again.

Perform these simple steps first to see if they resolve an issue

1 Restart your Mac

Turn it off and on again. Yes, it may sound like a cliche ripped straight from The IT Crowd, but often minor issues are resolved with a quick restart - especially if you haven’t done so in months.

2 Update your Mac

Launch System Preferences and then click on the ‘Software Update’ option to check that your system software is up to date. Sometimes an out-of-date OS can affect your apps.

3 Force Quit apps

If certain apps are sluggish or unresponsive, then you should consider force-quitting them. To do this, click on Apple>Force Quit, select the app and then click on the ‘Force Quit’ button.

4 Clean desktop

Having hundreds of files loose on your Mac desktop can cause it to perform sluggishly over time. Right-click on the desktop and choose ‘Use Stacks’ to restore some order.

5 Run First Aid

Open your Mac’s Disk Utility app, select your Mac HD and then click on the ‘First Aid’ button to run and check to see if any obvious problems are flagged up.

6 Back up everything

At the first sign of trouble, and if you don’t already, connect an external drive to your Mac and then go to System Preferences>Time Machine to start backing up your files.

Your Mac horrors exorcised!

Drive sharing

I heard that it is possible to rip CDs to my Music library, even if my Mac doesn’t have a CD drive, by sharing the drive of another Mac. How is this done? You’re right that you can share the CD/DVD drive of another Mac, the process of which we outline below. However, your hopes of ripping CDs remotely will be dashed, because this sharing feature doesn’t actually work with audio CDs or copy-protected DVDs (ie: most commercial DVDs), making it useless for your requirements. It can be useful for accessing creative projects from disc, though. For ripping CDs you will need to connect an external drive, like the Apple USB SuperDrive, to your Mac.