system preferences not working

Question

gary1941 Author

Level 1

7 points

system preferences not working

system preferences loading behavior

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.6), black screen

Posted on Feb 22, 2018 2:59 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Leanne_68

Community Specialist

Feb 23, 2018 9:58 AM in response to gary1941

Hello gary1941,

If I am understanding your post correctly, you are having issues with the System Preferences not loading up in your iMac. I know it's important to be able to have access to your preferences without issue. I'll be happy to help with this.

What I'd like to have you do is to:

Force quit System Preferences by pressing Command, Option, and Escape, then select System Preferences > Force Quit
Then restart your Mac
Hold the Shift key down while you relaunch System Preferences

How to force an app to quit

How to turn your Mac on or off

If the issue still remains, please boot the Mac into safe mode and test to see if you are able to launch System Preferences without issue.

Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac

Let me know how things go afterwards and if the issue persists, please report back with what exactly you are seeing on the screen when you try to open System Preferences.

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

Reply

Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

685,305 points

Feb 23, 2018 10:56 AM in response to gary1941

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Quit System Preferences.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

Reply

system preferences not working

Similar questions