Mac Problem!!! Any helpful Mac people?

[ambience exists]

Any Mac gurus in the house?
Has anyone ever seen this before?
Does anyone know what may be wrong or how to fix it?

Any help for a fellow DIY'er would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

[ambience exists]

Re-setting the PRAM didn't work.

[theAnonymous1]

If it's a new Mac you could always dual boot to Windows.

[ambience exists]

It is either a hardware issue (which would suck) or a problem with the Photobooth application itself which could be fixable. But I have no idea what's going on.

[planet10]

One can literally interpret the message to be that photobooth is not talking to the built-in camaera (you do have an iMac or MacBook with built-in camera -- i'd guess yes since you have a pic from before)

Could be software -- 1st thing you do (Tiger or Leopard?)

1/ repair disk permissions. Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility open, select 1st aid and clik repair permissions.

note: Titanium Onyx is a free utility that does this and a lot more.

2/ boot off a different disk with a fresh OS install and see if things work. (not easy if you don't have a suitable spare disk). If that works you need to do an archive install of the OS again (unlikely the problem unless you are experiencing other issues)

3/ is the camera talking to other aps (iChat or go into System Preferences > Accounts > select the avatar icon, choose edit picture and take a snapshot)

Or it could be hardware... see your local apple tech

dave

[ambience exists]

Thanks a lot, the camera was not responding with the System Preferences "edit picture" but I am performing option 1 right now...

[poptart]

does the camera work in other applications like ichat? That would rule out a hardware problem. And speaking of ichat, it's not open is it? Even if someone in another profile is using a program that uses the camera photobooth won't work.

On mac many things can be fixed by deleting old preferences files that have gotten screwed up. Photobooth's preference file is at-> your home folder/library/preferences/com.apple.PhotoBooth.plist

Drag that to the desktop or trash and open photobooth again, it will make a fresh preferences file with the default preferences.

edit: oops I see you already got advice to try another program and it didn't help. Hopefully one of the other tips will help.

[rabbitz]

You can overcome a lot of problems by doing a fresh install of the OS.

I got around my iMac problems with Leopard by using BootCamp and defaulting to XP at bootup.... ahh, much better.

[poptart]

Funny, but I consider reinstalling the OS the nuclear bomb of computer troubleshooting and will spend days trying to fix it instead of a few hours reinstalling. In more than 10 years of using macs I've never had a problem that required a full OS reinstall though.

You've probably run through the standard list of computer voodoo but: Unplug EVERYTHING but the monitor keyboard and mouse. Run software update and install all available patches, restart and run it again because more will often show up. Logout and login in as a different user and try it again. Shutdown, unplug the power cord, pull the battery if it's a laptop, press the power button in for a few seconds, you know make sure it's really dead then restart. On a Mac trash the prefs and all cache files that might be used by the app. Make sure you're not running anything like VMware or parallels.

Most apps and everything in the OS will log any problems they run into and you view these logs in an app called console. Launch photobooth then open /applications/utilities/console and you should see a wack of messages from photobooth.

[planet10]

Originally posted by poptart
Funny, but I consider reinstalling the OS the nuclear bomb of computer troubleshooting and will spend days trying to fix it instead of a few hours reinstalling. In more than 10 years of using macs I've never had a problem that required a full OS reinstall though.

My experience pretty much (24 years of experience thou). With OS X a renstall is needed occasionally. Fotuneately the archive & ibstall retains most everything (it seems to miss one folder that Photoshop needs).

You've probably run through the standard list of computer voodoo but: Unplug EVERYTHING but the monitor keyboard and mouse. Run software update and install all available patches, restart and run it again because more will often show up. Logout and login in as a different user and try it again. Shutdown, unplug the power cord, pull the battery if it's a laptop, press the power button in for a few seconds, you know make sure it's really dead then restart. On a Mac trash the prefs and all cache files that might be used by the app. Make sure you're not running anything like VMware or parallels.

Before & after updates one should repair disk permissions. Onyx does a lot of the other things in it automation script (including cache nuking). IDefrag is usful if your drive has ever gotten close to being full (the auto-defrag in the newest OS revs is not nearly as thourough)

dave