Tim Flight

Yesterday I mentioned my lack of enthusiasm for the stability of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. Well, I might have solved some of my problems.

I figured my problem was system-wide since many different applications would randomly crash. And then on page 71 of the July 2005 edition of MacWorld I found a hint to my problem. I followed all of the procedures in the section “Take Out the Cache” which involves removing several font cache files in several locations. That didn’t solve my stability problems… but it did start me off on the right track.

I fired up /Applications/Font Book.app. I noticed that I had 180 fonts installed. What in the world do I need 180 fonts for? I can’t remember the time I switched fonts in anything. So I started deleting all of the fonts I didn’t desire anymore. I got down to about 75.

Then I noticed a little bullet to the right of some of the fonts. (Okay Apple, it is real obvious what that is for. :\ ) It tells you that you have identical fonts installed, one in your user folder and one in the system folder. So I selected all of my fonts, went to the Edit menu and selected Resolve Duplicates. There go a few more fonts.

Then I noticed in the File menu called Validate Fonts. I again selected all fonts and selected the Validate Fonts menu item. Another dialog box came up as it went through all of my fonts. It found four corrupt fonts which I promptly removed. Now down to 66 fonts.

I repaired disk permissions for good measure and restarted…. No apps have unexpectedly crashed yet since! I’ve still got some networking problems that I can’t nail down due to my (more complicated than most) home network setup that seems to be OS related, but I’m living with it for now. Keeping my fingers crossed and my fonts not-corrupt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.