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scratt
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: M-F: Thailand Weekends : F1 2010 - Various Tracks!
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2005-01-26, 23:19

Thats very interesting.

I have to say though, that I think the "real-world" situation on many Macs out there flys in the face of that particular Daring Fireball article, as interesting as it is.

I tend to agree with most of what he writes, but on this occasion have my reservations, as much as I can see his points.

I myself have experienced problems with Delta Updates and solved them with Combo Updates.

I also am part of the group that think Repairing Permissions is a healthy option for routine system maintenance, as is a quick boot to another partition and running a Disk Utility check of your main System drive periodically.

I don't think OS X is bug free (no piece of sftware is) and regular intelligent maintenance is required, and on occasion files do get trashed... Annoying, but true.

For example, I am using Missing Sync to share appointments and contacts with a mobile device at the moment and the whole Bluetooth syncing crap went down the other day for no reason whatsoever. I tried everything, including Reparing Permissions and in the end had to resort to an uninstall and re-install of Missing Sync. I had not had any catastrophic failiures on my machine recently, nor run any nasty haxies, or pieces of 'naughty' software.. In fact the most radicle thing that I had done was a shut down a re-boot to clear out some memory that Photoshop had stolen permanetly! Somewhere along the line a file must have become corrupted and was causing the problem. Re-installing all the files from scratch was the only solution.

I particularly think that Delta Updates have yet to prove themselves as 100% problem free when being used update after update. Anecdotary (spelling!??!) evidence tends to suggest that Combo Updates are more reliable.

On the flip side running a machine for four years without any 'maintenance' shows what a reliable and solid system we are lucky enough to have. Hat's off to Apple for that...

'Remember, measure life by the moments that take your breath away, not by how many breaths you take'
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Last edited by scratt : 2005-01-26 at 23:24.
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