• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

On the subject of upgrades ...

RogerS

RogerS

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..and not wishing to hijack Mike's thread, this one is about a recent Mac experience.

New update for Sequoia came out and I started downloading it and then forgot all about and disappeared for a couple of hours. On return I found that I had a dead Mac. No boot up. No start-up sound. Keyboard caps lock light dead. Unplugged from the mains, waited a couple of minutes, then powered up again. Thank God for the iPad. Online to Apple support and we muddled through. Still no sign of life.

Then I noticed that the 'on' light on both external hard-drives was on. Ergo there was power in the Mac...just gone AWOL. Last time this happened, turned out that it couldn't boot up far enough to start communicating with the wireless keyboard. So I got out the wired keyboard and tried that. Nope.

Power-cycled again. Still nowt. But quite by chance I happened to hit a key on the wireless keyboard and there popped up the Apple logo. And after several reboots, it finished its update and all seems OK. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that leaving it to 'do its own thing' was not a good idea as clearly there was some 'state' inside the OS where it was well and truly hung. Probably was waiting for me to click 'Continue' but as I wasn't there, it did nothing until some other watchdog kicked in and by its operation got the Mac into an unknown state.

But now here's the spooky thing. I always thought that AI was only on the Apple chip Macs. Well....I seem to have got a baby AI because I wrote an email which said that I was sending some files. But I forgot to attach them. My Mac didn't. When I hit 'send' it told me that as I'd written I was sending some files....where were then ?
 
I was a Mac-ist for several years. It was nothing but trouble from the very beginning.
Eventually I cut my losses and went back to Windows. With all its many, many faults, it was a better experience for me.
My current gripe is that my machine does not meet W11 spec, but there are (perfect successful, as far as I can tell) work around. Then Microsoft says that you CAN upgrade, without the necessary hardware spec, then in the next breath tells you to revert to W10.
Grrrr.
S
 
If you are re-booting anything PC or Mac, it can be a good idea to first unplug any plugged in drives or USB keys. Sometimes the boot sequence can glitch and the machine will be trying to boot from one of them. As they don't have an operating system on them, boot will fail. It should be trying to boot from the drive with the OS, and even if you didn't change the boot order in the BIOS, sometimes computers glitch at boot. All other peripherals are safe to leave in, but , yes, always a good idea to keep a wired keyboard and mouse to hand and plug them in if boot fails, then reboot again, as the drivers for wireless ones get loaded later in the boot sequence.Sometimes ( again glitches ) a computer ( any OS ) will fail to find a keyboard and just refuse to boot, or hang on boot.
 
mwinfrance said:
If you are re-booting anything PC or Mac, it can be a good idea to first unplug any plugged in drives or USB keys. Sometimes the boot sequence can glitch and the machine will be trying to boot from one of them. As they don't have an operating system on them, boot will fail. It should be trying to boot from the drive with the OS, and even if you didn't change the boot order in the BIOS, sometimes computers glitch at boot. All other peripherals are safe to leave in, but , yes, always a good idea to keep a wired keyboard and mouse to hand and plug them in if boot fails, then reboot again, as the drivers for wireless ones get loaded later in the boot sequence.Sometimes ( again glitches ) a computer ( any OS ) will fail to find a keyboard and just refuse to boot, or hang on boot.
Click to expand...
That’s where you are wrong. All my external drives have an OS on them. Maybe different in Microsoft land but not here in Mac-land.
 
The prompt for unattached attachments was, I'm pretty sure, a feature in Outlook+Exchange over a decade ago, when I used them at work, so I expect other mail systems will have had equivalents for a long time.
Iirc, it's just a script that checks for keywords in the email. No AI, just a bit of developers' imagination.
 
That’s where you are wrong. All my external drives have an OS on them. Maybe different in Microsoft land but not here in Mac-land.
Click to expand...

Ah , I'm all linux* , 14 pcs..only 3 are windows, those never go on line, they just run my lasers and large Epson printers, we print our own comic books of my son's work . Mac I have only rarely had anything to do with. by "all my external drives have an OS on them", do you mean that they are running as alternative / flavours of Apples OSs or versions of the Mac OS , What do they have at boot time similar to "grub" to let them decide which of their different OSs to actually boot from ? Or that they are using the same file system ?

* There are other file systems available than just Mac or MS, :)I have one PC here which is running a variant of BSD, which is closer to the Mac version of UNIX, Mac system was derived from BSD.
 
I've used both, prefer mac, it's the way it works so well with my iphone, I don't miss having to email myself files, airdrop is amazing, I like being able to send txt messages on my mac with a real keyboard through my phone, everything integrates so much better, so far so good.
 
I never bother to 'upgrade' our iMac as it uses the same OS it came with. If it works well (which it does) and moreover does what you want it to do (which it does) leave well alone (which I do) - Rob
 
Woodbloke said:
I never bother to 'upgrade' our iMac as it uses the same OS it came with. If it works well (which it does) and moreover does what you want it to do (which it does) leave well alone (which I do) - Rob
Click to expand...
You're not worried about missing out on all the extra security patches, then ?
 
RogerS said:
You're not worried about missing out on all the extra security patches, then ?
Click to expand...
No Rog, the machine still works absolutely fine so I don't tinker. If there's a problem I 'fone the Apple help line and a very nice person will always sort out any problem. Keep life simples! - Rob
 
Woodbloke said:
No Rog, the machine still works absolutely fine so I don't tinker. If there's a problem I 'fone the Apple help line and a very nice person will always sort out any problem. Keep life simples! - Rob
Click to expand...
Your call but I think you're playing with fire.
 
Playing with fire indeed. And the fact that one doesn't notice any problems does not equate to there not being any. I have seen too many proofs of that.

But maybe my world view has been distorted by teaching professionals offensive and defensive information security for more than 20 years...
 
Ah, and to address another point many people make: "I am not interesting enough to be hacked". It is most often not you or your system in particular they are after.

It's all just about getting resources. That might be computing power on your system or through access to the cloud, or money you might be willing to part with. They just shoot with hail and see which systems might successfully get hit. Hacking is so cheap and easy to them that it doesn't matter if only a very small percentage leads to getting additional resources. Even then there's still a viable business model in it for them.
 
HdV said:
Ah, and to address another point many people make: "I am not interesting enough to be hacked". It is most often not you or your system in particular they are after.

It's all just about getting resources. That might be computing power on your system or through access to the cloud, or money you might be willing to part with. They just shoot with hail and see which systems might successfully get hit. Hacking is so cheap and easy to them that it doesn't matter if only a very small percentage leads to getting additional resources. Even then there's still a viable business model in it for them.
Click to expand...
Complacency is their ally.
 
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