Is Your Mac Giving You Headaches?

Generally, I get a lot of calls from friends saying that something is wrong with their Mac. Besides the fact that the computers in question generally “get broken”, and they have almost never “been broken”, another thing that never stops to amaze me is that they always prefer to pick up the phone instead of trying to give Google a try.

I know it’s hard to believe, but chances are someone else had already faced the problem you are dealing with at some point, and the answer to your question can be found on the Web. Although, I actually think that Google should start offering prizes for people who manage to type an original query, I’ve come Jto peace with the thought that people prefer asking for help rather than searching for the solution. Still, I’ve assembled a list with the most common problems that I encountered, and quick solutions for fixing them in hope that at least a few people would use it instead of ringing their friend who’s “good with computers”.

The one thing to keep in mind is that this is in no way an “official troubleshooting guide” and although the fixes are pretty safe and will work most of the times, you should put them into practice at your own risk.

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Hiding and viewing hidden files on Mac OS X isn’t as easy as doing it on other operating systems. That’s because there is no graphical command and most people don’t really want to dabble with the Terminal. However, if your need for privacy is bigger than your fear of command-line interfaces, here’s what you need to know in order to hide and view hidden files.

For larger applicability, I will show you how to hide (and view) entire folders, but every command will work exactly the same if you were trying to conceal just a single file. We will be using the terminal a lot for this exercise, and the quickest way to launch it is to press the Command and Space keys (simultaneously), then type Terminal and press Enter.

Hiding Folders

Once you get the hang of it, you will see that hiding folders isn’t actually all that difficult. The first thing that you need to do is open up the Terminal and type in chflags hidden (type a space after the command as well). Now simply drag and drop the folder you wish to hide into the Terminal window — this will add the full path after your command — press Enter and the folder will no longer be visible in the Finder window. Alternatively, you can manually type in the full path to the folder instead of dragging and dropping it, but that will take longer.

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