Onyx to the rescue!
I have gotten into a whole new level of admiration for Onyx.
Our Mac Mini was acting up. For some reason, in one of the user accounts, we could not attach files in Hotmail. We also couldn’t delete messages. The problem cropped up when I upgraded the Mac Mini from Tiger to Leopard. I didn’t do a fresh install. And I was beginning to regret it. I tried Safari, Firefox, even some of the other “fringe” browsers like Flock and Shiira. Still no go. The problem did not manifest if we were using an account with admin privileges, so I suspected it had something to do with security privileges. I had already turned off the Parental Controls, downloaded the latest versions of Safari and Firefox, but still it didn’t work.
I was about ready to do a fresh install. I already backed-up the machine. I already copied our personal files (pictures, documents, movies) to an external drive.
But then I figured to try Onyx to do some system clean-up and maintenance. Onyx is Titanium Software’s multifunction utility application. It claims to verify the status of the startup disk and the structure of system files.
What the heck, I told myself. What do I have to lose? It’s donation-ware.
First, it asked to check and verify my startup disk. And here it discovered the first problem. I don’t recall exactly what the error message was, but it asked me to repair the disk using Apple’s Disk Utility.
I had already cloned the Leopard installation DVD on an external drive, so running the repair function was a piece of cake.
After a repairing the startup disk, I went through Onyx’s maintenance screen which would verify and repair system permissions.
It took some time to execute. In the end, it found some inconsistent security permissions and corrected it automatically. Again I didn’t note down the message but it had to do with some java files. Could this be it?
After another restart, we gave it a try. Voila! Now it works!
March 27 2008 05:12 am | Software
