Mac 101: Comprehensive Mac system information

More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users.

Last week we pointed out some documents Apple has made available for storing important information on your Mac. Information that you might need when talking to a repair tech or Apple Genius. In that post, TUAW reader Tom pointed out another way to generate a thoroughly comprehensive report of similar information without all that pesky "writing."

Basically, it's a printout of all the information that's stored in System Profiler. Here's how to do it. From the Apple Menu, select About this Mac. A new window appears. Click More Info to launch System Profiler. From there, select print and watch as your Mac prepares the System Profiler info for printing.

You'll notice that it's taking a long, long time. That's because there's a huge amount of information being compiled. Aside from the basics that we addressed last time, it's grabbing every error log entry, vitals on every app you've got installed, network information and a whole heck of a lot more. When I ran this report the resulting document was 2.7MB and 500 pages!

So don't print. Unless you're at work. I kid!

Instead, you can save to PDF, encrypt it with a tool like Knox and store it in a safe location. Note that some of the information will change between the time you create the file and when you're likely to need it, like the list of installed apps and log reports. Also, Apple's forms make it much easier to get to the information you're likely share with a tech. Finally, much of the information in this report is sensitive and you'll want to keep it away from less-than-savory characters.

It's overkill, but someday you might need something in that report to revive an ailing machine.

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Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/08/27/mac-101-keep-all-your-service…

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Mac 101

More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Last week we pointed out some documents Apple has made available for...

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Fais

Ok i'm new to Mac may I ask a quick question? If you have two windows open in your browser of choice (chrome in my case) how do you quickly switch between them? I'm not talking about browser tabs but separate browser windows Ctrl + Tab does it in windows..

August 31 2010 at 6:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Fais's comment

Ska

Command ~

September 01 2010 at 4:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hone Melgren

Also lists all your kernel extensions , what versions they are at , what date they were modified as well as a bit of debugging information on each one. Also the path to each one (some kernel extensions are technically stored in other ones)

Also in the above you can save an ASP report by going File Menu-> Save

Lastly before I forget OS X 10.5.8 ASP 10.5.7 (121)

August 30 2010 at 12:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hone Melgren

IMHO It's actually more useful to save it. It can be saved as XML , RTF and UTF-16.

Multiple reports can be opened in the same ASP just with different windows with the computer name up the top left. You can also set it to do a Basic or Mini report (other then the Full Report).

You can use it to compare whats installed on one computer to whats installed on another computer by sending a saved XML report from one computer to the other. You can upload the report somehere and download it on a different machine - I did this for someone on a OS X mailing list (I'm in NZ she was in USA)

Since it's a XML or RTF document that gets outputted anything that can read and edit those 2 formats can read and edit them. For example I uploaded mine to my dropbox then edited my account name and serial number out using Word for Windows at work then re-uploaded it somewhere else.

Lastly for the true power users in the audience it has a shell command - system_profiler . man system_profiler for details on how to use it

eg system_profiler | grep MTU > ~/desktop/output.txt

August 30 2010 at 12:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

izdale

There is a much faster way to get to System Profilerâ€¦ Hold down Option when you click the Apple menu and About This Mac will change to System Profiler.

August 30 2010 at 11:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply