Thursday, November 27, 2008

A Tech Support Mystery

Last week, my co-worker Gerald came to my cube saying his PowerMac G5 was consistently locking up after starting up and bringing up Entourage. He had come to me as I am the Mac programmer on staff, and therefore considered to know all things Macintosh.

I went down to his cube to find the G5 unresponsive to mouse clicks; locked up just has he had said. Very odd. After a few seconds of futzing around I realized that the machine did respond to right clicks. And a few seconds later, Gerald mentioned in passing that every time he restarted, the optical drive ejected. I immediately knew what the problem was. Can you solve this mystery? Answer below.
















The left mouse button of his Logitech mouse was stuck in the clicked state. Thus the machine was non-responsive to mouse clicks, and as everyone should know, holding down the mouse button while restarting will eject the optical drive of a Mac. I went and got a Mighty Mouse, plugged it in and the machine worked perfectly.