Yea! I had a computer problem

We've had a couple of power outages recently, and when I went to reboot my desktop this morning it didn't come back. I got the "happy "Mac" sound and then just a black screen, with an arrow cursor -- no apps, no desktop.

Checked recommendations at Apple (using my iPad) and they recommended running diagnostics on boot-up = hold down the D key.

That fixed it.

You don't have a UPS?

Nope. Maybe I should consider one -- during the windstorm we were offline for 29 hours. Almost lost all my frozen food.

But that's extremely rare.

When we have an outage, I close all programs and shut down the computer immediately. The UPS keeps the DSL modem and the router hot, so we can still use wifi devices. I can also recharge cell phones, etc., with the UPS outlets.

Very handy.

If I was going to get a UPS I'd want to go the whole hog and get a gas-powered generator that can run the whole house for a day or more.

I don't care (much) about the computer going down.

And when it happens we don't get any warning. It's just -blip- gone.

Unfortunately, "blip-gone" can sometimes be permanent for the computer. a UPS is good protection for the computer - and they are cheap. A 200- or 300-amp whole-house generator, with installation, can be quite expensive. And if they are gasoline powered, the maintenance can be a pain.

One thing I absolutely HATE about my computer, although I imagine it's common to almost any good-size computer these days, is that it's fucking impossible to figure out where files actually reside.

I have a 3.11 TB internal hard drive, a 2.0TB and a 1.0TB external hard drive, and a 100GB removable drive.  With 6.21TB of storage overall, I'm forever losing stuff.  I have to resort to the "find file" utility, which almost always finds the file (if I remember the name...) but still doesn't tell me where the fuck it is.

Maybe I need to do some housekeeping.  Trouble is, my download preferences are all set to dump files to various places, and if I start moving files around they're going to get confused.

For instance, I'm getting ready to burn a CD I've been working on for a friend.  It has files downloaded from iTunes, files from Amazon, files I recorded myself, files extracted from YouTube videos.  Getting all these in one place, in one format, so they can be burned to a CDR is killing me.

I feel your pain.

That's why all of my programs are set to download files to the same drive/directory. I have to manually move them to where I want them. It takes only seconds and helps me to remember where they are.

_Howard wrote:

Unfortunately, "blip-gone" can sometimes be permanent for the computer.

I don't know if it's true or not, but I remember reading somewhere once that the Apple OS did things in kernels -- if one program freezes up, it doesn't freeze up the rest of the computer. When the computer crashes -- which yes it will do, under extreme circumstances -- each of your open programs will re-open exactly where you were when the platform went down. I've never had any problems after a power outage, which unfortunately is still a 3-4 times/year occurrence around here.

Maybe just lucky.

I do remember back in my PC days that my CD burning program, and my graphics editing program, were pretty notorious for crashing the computer. When that happened I lost everything that wasn't saved. Occasionally I came back with corrupted fonts and weird shit like that.

NoCoPilot wrote:

...if one program freezes up, it doesn't freeze up the rest of the computer.

This is standard behavior for all  modern multi-tasking operating systems.
If I have a program freeze, I just go into the task manager and stop the process and carry on.

NoCoPilot wrote:

When the computer crashes...each of your open programs will re-open exactly where you were when the platform went down.

That sounds like sleep mode.
It's a trivial matter for the OS to relaunch programs that were open when the computer crashed, but restoring the state of the program is up to the program itself. A well-written program will know on launch whether or not it was closed properly. If it has saved the state of the program on the hard drive, it can easily restore itself.

There is a problem with this, however. Most computer crashes are caused by a poorly-written application program. Do you really want that program to fire up again and possibly cause another crash? 'Round and 'round we go.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I've never had any problems after a power outage...

Except for the minor problem you described in the first post of this thread.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I do remember back in my PC days that my CD burning program, and my graphics editing program, were pretty notorious for crashing the computer.

Yeah! The early CD burners were horribly unreliable. I got a call from Microsoft trying to sell me one when they were new. Wanted $3,500 for a 2X CD burner.

Graphics programs have always been problematic. Early graphics drivers were junk. Couple that with the programmers trying to write a program for speed, and you wind up with insufficient error checking and crash-a-roony!