A very good “If your Mac won’t start” howto article

Don't PanicMacWorld has a very nice article on what to do if you Mac won’t start up. It’s full of great advice but still misses the most important piece of advice, “Don’t Panic!” I’ve owned a Mac since 1984 and only one of them has ever gone belly up — from a dead hard drive. In all other instances, it’s been a software glitch that caused the problem. Well, except for the problem of the overheated display card that caused my Apple Cinema Display to mimic the symptoms of a dead cold cathode fluorescent tube (CCFL).

In that instance the monitor stayed dark for quite some time while the Mac was booting and when the display did show something, the lower half was blank. But oddly the power light did not blink, which is one of the telltales of a dead CCFL. It turns out the display card in the Mac was so encrusted with dust and cat hairs that it was overheating, causing the display problem.

So do Don’t Panic! It’s probably something simple to fix and the solution is usually a parameter reset, as described in the article.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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