explanation for simultaneous software & hardware problem
I've had a few tech problems and am tryiing to determine their causes--SW or HW.
1) About six weeks ago I signed up to a few on-line services that don't work with Safari. I stopped using it, and since I take a performance hit with both browsers open, haven't tried using it since. Long story short, on the few occasions that Safari has opened recently (my email program uses Safari as the default to open html links embedded in messages) it's unable to connect to the net. I can view local files with it on my hard drive, but that's it.
2) Tonight I went to wake my ibook from sleep and couldn't move the cursor with the trackpad. I plugged in my old mouse and the cursor came back on-line. I then re-started and got my trackpad back working.
3) Another strange recent occurence: the "|" that you see at the cursor's insertion point sometimes remains on the screen even after the cursor has been moved elsewhere.
Is there a possibility these happenings are connected? How would I know whether they were SW or HW related? I dropped my i-book about 4 weeks ago--about 2-3 feet, onto a carpeted floor. Everything seemed fine at the time--it was sleeping and awoke ok--but I'm wondering if there was damage that is now showing up. OTOH I may just be at the point where I need to reformat my hard drive and re-install the OS, since I've had this computer for 3 years and never done so (I know, I know). Is it possible these issues are software related?
1) About six weeks ago I signed up to a few on-line services that don't work with Safari. I stopped using it, and since I take a performance hit with both browsers open, haven't tried using it since. Long story short, on the few occasions that Safari has opened recently (my email program uses Safari as the default to open html links embedded in messages) it's unable to connect to the net. I can view local files with it on my hard drive, but that's it.
2) Tonight I went to wake my ibook from sleep and couldn't move the cursor with the trackpad. I plugged in my old mouse and the cursor came back on-line. I then re-started and got my trackpad back working.
3) Another strange recent occurence: the "|" that you see at the cursor's insertion point sometimes remains on the screen even after the cursor has been moved elsewhere.
Is there a possibility these happenings are connected? How would I know whether they were SW or HW related? I dropped my i-book about 4 weeks ago--about 2-3 feet, onto a carpeted floor. Everything seemed fine at the time--it was sleeping and awoke ok--but I'm wondering if there was damage that is now showing up. OTOH I may just be at the point where I need to reformat my hard drive and re-install the OS, since I've had this computer for 3 years and never done so (I know, I know). Is it possible these issues are software related?
Comments
Reformat, install. That way you can isolate hardware problems.
Is there anyway to preserve the contents of the hard drive without re-installing all of my software (which is going to be a nightmare--most of it, except the Ibook install disks,--is in storage, and then there's all the helper apps, like real player, Acrobat, etc that were just simple downloads).
Is there a work-around for that? Suppose I copy my hard drive's contents onto an external drive I have, and then recopy it back to the ibook after I've re-installed my OS and reformatted my drive.
Or what if i just re-install OS 10?