Girlfriends mac won't startup.
It's been playing up a bit latley, crashing, freezing, hanging etc... (hey, wasn't OSX not supposed to do that?).
When it starts now it just sits there with the apple logo on the screen, not even that little spinney thing going round and round.
Can a mac get started in 'safe mode'?
Tried holding shift key on start up (I was informed from a website) to get a safe mode thingy but nothing.
Suggestions anyone?
Bin it and buy a PC. ;)
>not even that little spinney thing going round and round
Are you sure it's not a microwave oven?
I told her to get a PC in the first place, but oh no, she was told that a mac would be better. (never listenes to me)
I hold her that if i goes wrong I wouldn't be able to help her, I know little enough about the workings of a PC and even less about a mac.
Stick a message on the forum at www.macformat.co.uk and/or www.macassist.co.uk ? they're both good forums for Mac stuff.
What type of Mac is it? What's plugged in to it? Will it start up from CD if you insert the CD (or DVD, depending on what OS disk she has) and then hold "C" during the entire start-up process? If you can do the latter, access Disk Utility on the disk and then choose both Repair Disk and Repair Permissions (in the "First Aid" tab). If errors are found and fixed, repeat the tasks until the disk is clear of errors.
As for the whole OS X not hanging thing, it sort of depends which version she had. OS X 10.0 was a heap of shit. OS X 10.1 was bearable. OS X 10.2 was usable. 10.3 and 10.4 have, on the whole, been excellent and very stable. (I only tend to have system crashes when testing unstable alpha software for review, and even that's very, very rare.)
Another option for help would be www.macfixit.com, however it don't sound great at the moment...
What's the startup sound like? If there's something major wrong, then the chime will be "out-of-tune"...
Other than that the boot from CD is the best solution... What Mac is it btw...?
"Bin it and buy a PC"
Admit it- you've waited ages to say that, haven't you?!?
;)
That's rather like saying that when your Porshe breaks down, you should scrap it and buy a Ford Focus.
Is that a touch of Mac Snobbery(tm) I detect there?
;)
Good God, no! I will even confess to wondering if I'd made a mistake for quite some time at first (I've since put it down to the culture shock)- until I had to turn my PC on for something a while back. It was horrible! Everything was ugly and hurt my eyes!
I can do everything I did on my PC and more, but I'd never lambast somebody for buying a new PC instead of a Mac. At least, not to the evangelical levels that some people seem to.
;)
Not really. I have both a Mac and a PC here, and I've been using both platforms for over a decade. Macs are a long, long way from being perfect, but they're better than PCs for most tasks, seeing as PCs are a long, long, long, long, long, long, long way from being perfect. The lesser of two evils and all that.
"Macs are a long, long way from being perfect"
True. I've tried everything and mine still won't unfold into a giant stompy robot of doom.
Though it does tell exceptionally poor knock-knock jokes. Eh, it's a start.
Heh. Although I was only having a playful prod with a pointy stick, my dislike of Macs is from personal experience from 11 years as a graphic designer; both using them and from the snobbery from a scarily high proportion of designers/lecturers/twats (which I *wasn't* seriously accusing you of, I hasten to add!).
In the practical sense, it's down to personal preference for me, but twats saying things like "You're not a *proper* designer unless you use a Mac" to me over the years have garnered a hatred in me towards the rot that some Mac users spew out at PC users. It's like the Speccy vs C64 debacle, but ramped-up 1000% whilst mainlining shit and Vim.
Could it be a hardware problem?
If it's a laptop it might be a faulty logic board, video output or screen..
Sometimes frozen screen image, fragmented desktop graphics, crazy multicolour fractles(sp?) or a backlit screen with no image at all?
A tip to rescue work that isn't already backed up;
If you have access to another Mac you could try connecting the two with a firewire and booting/ restarting the brokendown one whilst holding down 't' this way a second hard drive icon should appear on the other mac desktop so you can retrieve all the files etc.
Good luck.
Anyone who accuses someone of not being a "proper" designer because they don't use a Mac is clearly an idiot. It'd be interesting to know how many of said people actually understand the basics of design (grids, typography, etc) outside of the computer?I bet a fair few don't.
As for the bile from Mac users in general, I find the exact same thing happens in reverse?plenty of PC users do the "Macs are shit" thing, the difference being that the majority of them have never used a Mac. For me, I dislike Windows?I think it's clunky, not very secure, and a pain to work with. Some Windows-based apps are, however, really good. The Windows version of Dreamweaver, for instance, far outshines the shoddy Mac version. The Mac is less clunky, more secure, and less of a pain to work with, although Finder is almost as bad as Windows Explorer...