10 Reasons Your Mac May Be Acting Strange and How to Fix It

If you see numbers or boxes on your screen, don't hear any sound, can't use some keys or your Mac wakes up from sleep on its own, there may be a simple explanation and an easy fix.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is your Mac now quite right? Here are ten ways your Mac could be acting strangely and how to fix it. 
Often when people ask me questions it's about something on their Mac that doesn't seem quite right. Sometimes the solution is pretty simple. For instance let's say that things are suddenly moving very slowly on your Mac. There are a lot of different reasons for this and I've got whole videos on this subject. But two of the main reasons are space on your drive or browser tabs. So to check space on your drive go to System Settings and then go to General and Storage. Here you're going to see how much storage you're using. If you have less than 10 or 20 gigs available it's probably going to make your Mac run slowly. Ideally you should have  40 or 50 gigs, maybe even more available if you're using apps that you know are memory intensive. Your Mac uses space on the drive as overflow for memory. When you don't have enough space available it can't do that. It's called Swap and it can't swap if there is no space available on the drive. So if your Mac is running slowly free up more space over here on the right by Archiving old files or deleting things you no longer need. 
The next most common reason is probably browser tabs. People don't realize that each tab in a browser is kind of like a separate app. So you may think, I only have a few apps open, just Mail, Notes, and my browser, why is my Mac running slowly. But if your browser has 20 tab, that's like twenty different apps running at the same time. It's really easy to go to a tab and close it and simply return to the page later. If it is a page you use often you could add it to Bookmarks, if you like. But you don't need to keep tabs open all the time. If your Mac is running slowly try to reduce your reliance on leaving tabs open for webpages you're not currently using. 
Now this one I hear all the time. It's when the keyboard isn't working right. If I ask more questions it turns out most keys work right. Like this. But then when you get to certain keys you don't get anything. It doesn't actually work. Depress the key, like the u key, i, o, j, or k or l and you don't get those characters. So when it is those specific characters on your keyboard what's happening here is something called Mouse Keys. So you go into System Settings and then go to Accessibility and then go down to Motor and not keyboard but Pointer Control because Mouse Keys is a way to use the keyboard to move the pointer. You can see I've got it turned on here. It will allow you to use certain keys on your keyboard to move the pointer around. But that means you can't use them to type. So if I simply turn off Mouse Keys then I can now use those keys as before. People don't often look here because they think, well I didn't go through all of that to turn it On. But there are shortcut ways to turn On Mouse Keys that you may have accidentally triggered and now you've got Mouse Keys On without ever having gone to System Settings. 
But another reason the keyboard could be acting strangely is if you go to System Settings and then go to where you would expect, Keyboard. Then look under Input Sources and click Edit. Here for most people you should just see one listing on the left and that's the keyboard that you have. But, if say you were in here playing around with this and you added another keyboard and switched to it, it could make the keys on your keyboard work differently. For instance, adding the French keyboard here you can see how the a key is in the upper left hand corner instead of q which is now below it. So suddenly is seems like some of the keys work and others don't. So make sure  you have the right keyboard selected to match the keys that are shown on your physical keyboard and perhaps you remove any that you're not using. 
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Here's another way things could look very weird indeed. Many times I have people say they're suddenly seeing numbers all over the screen. What are they and how can they get rid of them? Well, this is another Accessibility feature. Go into System Settings and then go to Accessibility again. This one is Voice Control. You can see here I have Voice Control turned On and there are shortcuts that allow you to turn this On without going to System Settings. So you could have accidentally turned it on. You can see it is actually showing an overlay with item numbers. So if you have this On and you don't need Voice Control simply turn Off voice control and those numbers will go away. 
Here's another odd thing you might see. Text that just appears in these boxes. Here you can see that wherever I move my pointer I get text showing me either the text that is under the pointer or sometimes the names of buttons and things like that. This is another thing people accidentally turn On and it is called Hover Text. So go into System Settings here and Accessibility and then look for Hover Text. You can turn it Off here. Note that it also has a mode where it only shows what's under the pointer when you hold down a key, like the Command Key. So as you are going to do things like Command C for copy it suddenly appears. 
Here's another Mac feature that people sometimes turn On by accident and they can't figure out what is going on. If you're not familiar with Stage Manager but you turn it On accidentally you may not know what is going on here when suddenly window being here on the left like this. If you select one of them it replaces what's there and then that window flies over there. Sometimes you don't even see these windows here, like if I go to Safari, Safari is too big so it actually hides those items here and then they pop out here on the left. Now, if you use Stage Manager this all makes perfect sense. This is what you want. But if you've never used Stage Manager before and you turn it On, suddenly everything seems very different. You can simply turn Off Stage Manager by going to Control Center and then look for the Stage Manager button. Click that and it turns it Off and everything returns to the normal mode where you just see multiple windows from multiple apps overlapping. 
Sometimes you may put your Mac to sleep and find it doesn't go to sleep or after putting it to sleep at some point it wakes up. This could be for several reasons. One is it could be that an app is waking it up. If you go to Activity Monitor, launch that app, and then you go to Energy you'll see here Preventing Sleep. Look in that column and see if any of the apps you currently have running, even things running in the background, have a Yes. In this case, for instance, the Screen Recording software I'm using is preventing sleep. But I normally wouldn't be screen recording and expect my Mac to go to sleep. But if you see Yes next to some other app know that you have to Quit that app in order for your Mac to stay asleep. 
But another reason may simply be your mouse. A lot of third party mice are very sensitive and if they are sitting on a desk and there are slight vibrations that make the mouse move, even imperceptibly, it may wake up your computer. If your mouse has an Off switch try switching off and see if your Mac will sleep better with your mouse switched off. 
Here's another issue that comes down to an Accessibility feature. Say you suddenly can't see your entire Mac's screen. You can go to the top and there's the Menu Bar and you can go to the bottom and there's the Dock but the entire screen isn't on your physical display at one time. That simply could be that you have turned On Zoom. So go, again, to System Settings and then Accessibility and then look for Zoom. Turn that Off. Now this happens when you have Zoom style set to Full Screen. But if you have it set to something like picture-in-picture you may see something like this which is also Zoom. This is also kind of strange if you don't know what it is. But if you don't need it simply turn it Off and that will go away. 
Now let's say you go to a webpage and this is what you expect to see. Here's one of my pages and you can see here's the video and comments below and everything. But what happens if you go to a webpage, instead of this you see something like this. In this case the video is missing. It seems to be missing a lot of the different features there. You can't figure out why you're not seeing all the navigation elements and regular things you would expect. This is simply because you have Reader View turned On. You can see this little indicator here showing that you do and you can Hide Reader. You can also go to View, and this is where you Show Reader or Hide Reader. You can see the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command R. Using Reader View is great when you're reading an article and just want to focus on the text. But for pages that have more complex elements it could really mess them up and make them impossible to use or figure out how to accomplish something on the page. 
Now if you always go to a website and it is always in Reader View it is probably because in Safari Settings, under Websites, and then look for Reader here at the top, you've got it set to, maybe, Always Be On. So look for the website there and see if you set it to be Always On. That means anytime you go to that site it's going to automatically be in Reader View. You can either set it to Always Be Off on that site or simply select it and Remove to remove that from the list of preferences. Then the website will just act normally. 
Now another problem you could have is something that doesn't appear to be on your screen at all but something that has to do with your keyboard. You've got the keys at the top of your keyboard, the F keys, F1 to F12 or more if you've got an extended keyboard. They also have special symbols on the top. You may be used to using those to do one of those special features. Like for instance the F12 key turns the volume Up while F11 will actually turn the volume Down. But then all of a sudden it's not working. Those keys don't turn the volume up or down. Or conversely you may use F11 and F12 for special functions inside of some apps that say the keyboard shortcut for a certain thing is F11 or F12. They work find and then suddenly they don't and instead it is controlling the volume. These keys have two modes. Think of how the letter keys work. Like the a key when you press a you get a lower case a. Hold the Shift key down and press A and you get an upper case A. The F keys at the top do the same thing. They'll do one thing when you just press them. But if you hold the fn key or Globe key down then they do the other thing. So it's the fn key or Globe key, not the Shift key that modifies these. 
If you go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard, go to Keyboard Shortcuts and then look for Function Keys. You'll find the toggle switch here. This toggles whether or not they are F keys, like F1 and F2 when you press them normally. Then you need the Globe or fn key to use the features shown on them. Or the features, like Volume Up and Volume Down are the default and the fn or Globe key needs to be used to switch them to things like F11 and F12. You can have it toggled either way and just use the fn or Globe key to get to the other set of functionality. But it is good to understand how this toggle switch works and why those keys may have changed on you if you've changed this toggle. 
Finally, let's talk about Sound. Say sound on your Mac is working fine and then all of a sudden it isn't. The videos are playing without any sound. You play music and you don't get any sound. You don't hear any system beeps or anything. Now, of course, it could be just that you've turned your volume all the way down so you can turn it up using the Volume Keys on your keyboard or you can go here in Control Center and you can adjust your volume right here. But also it could be because you've switched the output. So it is sending the sound to a different device. If I click here in Control Center it actually will allow me to choose the output. Now you can see I've got a lot of different things here and you may have, say, a set of external speakers or even headphones attached. You can see all of these here and you may have switched to one, like for instance the sound could be playing out of headphones and you are not actually wearing those headphones which is why you don't hear the sound. Or maybe you've switched to a different display that doesn't actually have the volume turned up or the speakers enabled. So go here to choose the output. You can also get to this by going to System Settings and then looking for Sound here on the left and you've got Output here and you can choose where the output goes to. The same thing is true for microphones. You go to Input you may have multiple microphones here. For instance, I've got two ones on my Mac's display and also a separate external microphone. If you switched to one and many apps allow you to switch inside that app so you may not realize you switched it. Now suddenly when you try to record with your microphone it is not working. So, check to make sure that the right input source is set there and also that your input volume is turned up. A common thing might be to have this turned all the way down for some reason. Maybe you accidentally turned it down when video conferencing and you used it as a way to kind of mute your mike and you forgot that. So make sure this is turned up a decent amount so that you've got input. You can test that right here. You can see the input level as you speak so you can get your input right before returning to the app that you were using to record. 
So there are ten very common problems that people have with their Macs that make things act strangely but are hard to figure out. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Reasons Your Mac May Be Acting Strange and How to Fix It”

Lazer W.
1 month ago
There's an easier way to get out of reader view, you simply click on the side outside of the reader.
Eugenia Burkes
Very helpful but you didn't mention a problem I'm currently having. The caps lock key, especially when naming a document, causes the screen to flutter and keyboard doesn't work. Any suggestions?
Gary Rosenzweig
Eugenia: I don't know of anything that would cause that. You should contact Apple support and try to figure out what could be wrong.
MIchael Nohe
One recurring issue is files "graying out" for reasons unknown. Usually, a reboot will bring them back but sometimes it takes several tries. Using a new (less than 6 month old Mac with latest software.
10 Reasons Your Mac May Be Acting Strange and How to Fix It

Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Reasons Your Mac May Be Acting Strange and How to Fix It”

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