2 May 2006
Just a couple of days ago my daughter’s PC died. It wasn’t that bad, some chip got tired and needed replacement. She did not lose any data but is was a warning – the May holidays are a good time to back up the many GB in my iMAC.
Yep, I live (rather happily) on my Apple island in the office, all others use PC. I never managed to work on those. When I travel I can use them for some work as long as it is simple stuff like e–mail and the usual MS Office.
I am indeed one of those loners, no PC and certainly not Outlook and Explorer (Yuk – who that live with that stuff?). Netscape is still great, forgotten and even ridiculed. But on MAC OS X it runs great, in one program you have Explorer, Outlook and (mini) Web Design. I edit webpages before I print them or save them as PDF. Try that with that Explorer. Finally MS has decided to modernize their old stuff called Explorer, now the Beta version is available. I use only Explorer for narrow-minded websites that think the only browser in the world is IE. Our website is tested with several browsers and OS platforms. Nothing that spectacular, only requires a bit more work.
I just downloaded Firefox. Works just like Netscape and runs well. Safari is also good. But Netscape remains my default program at least as for now.
Doing the back-up is not really your dream of spending a holiday. My MAC OS 10.3.9 needs the new 10.4, since one year sitting on the shelf and you never know what happens with an upgrade. Hopefully the new OS will improve some of the pesky OS X little problems. First I thought my MAC wasn’t right but then reading on the Web, I wasn’t the only one.
Downloading on a PC external HD is a good test to see if all files are OK, names are correct and folders do not have those irritating hidden files, messing up downloads.
I finally understand (?) the simple ABC of names: the PC disk hates any “/” in a folder name. I mostly thought the file names were too long or contained those “special characters”. Well no, I did a “Find” search for files with a /, changed those to _ and there we go without problems.
Well not entirely.
Even MAC external disks were complaining about some of my folders while at first there seemed nothing wrong. I found the (unexplained) problem: some folders have the invisible files “_Icon”. That’s the bad guy.
With Find File plus the additional setting “invisible files” I got the list of the bad folders, not that excessive, some 25 in total. Trashing the Icon in the Search Results did not work. The solution was Norton Antivirus, “View Files” and show invisible. You look for the bad folders, find the Icon and trash it within Norton. Works and then the downloads went fine. I am still not clear if the trash is really emptied – Norton sees still some of those pests in the trash while the desktop trash folder is empty.
But real pesky are those zillions of new files created by OS X on PC disks, serving no purpose at all: all files are joined by namesakes preceded by _ and DS_Store in all folders. I have thousands of pics – on the PC disk they just double in quantity… They confuse, take up space and are a pain to delete if you want to do it, what I mostly do in a PC or on my good old PowerBook with OS 9. Apple can say what they want – I loved OS 9 and keep as a treasure my old PowerBook. At least I could understand what OS 9 was doing – OS X sometimes makes me wonder if we are being led into PC world by force. Or maybe I am getting too old. Well, till now I have not seen one MAC guru who really knows what all that stuff is in OS X “you don’t need to know, if it does not work just re-install the OS”. Great. Sounds like my PC people in the office: about once a month the PCs (with Chinese OS) need some “reloading”. They say it’s normal, also PC crash is said to be normal (at least in my office – not really a reference). We Macfanatics are NOT used to that.
the office of one more Macfanatic, in Beijing
Hopefully OS 10.4 will be better….
Comments from gurus and alike are welcome. I am NOT one, I just try to survive…