Create a new user as a troubleshooting aid

Jan 17, '02 11:44:30PM

Contributed by: robg

This may have been mentioned in a comment here at some point, or even in passing in a story. But it bears repeating as a full hint of its own.

If you are having difficulties in OS X, there are many ways to troubleshoot. Some are quite similar to the OS 9 style of troubleshooting - disable applications that load at login, try trashing preferences in your user's preferences folder, test without third-party hardware devices attached, etc.

However, there's a new tool you can use thanks to the inherent multi-user nature of OS X - try creating a new user and see if the problem persists. This can be especially helpful when troubleshooting an application problem. When I had a problem with mail quitting on launch, I used a second user ID to determine that the problem was only with my primary user - the new user was able to launch Mail perfectly well. This narrowed the scope of the problem to something (preference file or bad application) within my primary user's space. It turned out to be a corrupted Address Book database file.

So think about creating a second user ID for use in troubleshooting OS X - it doesn't take up much drive space, and it could help save a bit of time in identifying whether you have a user-level problem or a higher system-level problem.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020117234430562