Re: maintenance

tom_elam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx said the following on 30/11/2005 02:29 am:

That's a LOT of work.  On an XP machine I run de*** every 90 days and
backup about once a week.  Everything else is automatic.  Another
reason not to own a Mac.  Like most things beautiful on the outside -
high maintenance.

As I said, I use onyx because I don't leave the computer on, so the cron jobs (I think) won't get done. I could just change the times in the crontab, maybe, but I find it useful to know when I have just done it, and watch the results in Uninstaller over the next few days as various programs replace files I deleted. Other than that It's just backup and DW which it turns out is unnecesary (and hardly could be called work), Uninstaller is just something I feel for myself is necessary to know what's going on with my files, knowing that all those programmers out there (understandably) have things other than myself and my data integrity as priorities. It's also the best way I have found to almost effortlessly pick up a lot of things about how the underlying system is working.

It's not a lot of work, and often I find that the relatively small amount of knowledge I've picked up saves me work at other times, and enables me to help out friends who aren't so interested in it.

A good example was the kernel panic problems I was having. I can't remember all the details, but I was able to narrow it down quickly and fix it, rather than go through all the usual re-installs and so on first before having to call someone in. It was a fairly obscure problem, only affecting a few operations used by few programs.

There have been many other instances, including things I spot before they become trouble. You simply can't claim that windows doesn't have these types of problems. Well you can claim it, obviously but...

Windows definitely improved over the years, at least to Win2k pro which is where I stopped 'upgrading', but it still needs an eye kept on it, even more so than this system. And keeping an eye on it is harder. I think that's a fundamental difference between windows and other current 'desktop' OSs. Unix-like systems are designed for delving into, windows seems to resent delving with a vengeance, and obstruct rather than facilitate.

I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert, but I managed to run a small-town cyber-cafe (4 macs) for a year with no downtime and no problems. Someone with my level of knowledge could not even have got it working using windows. I mean my knowledge of networking and system admin, not any specific OS. OS X is easy to use, yet still easy to explore and learn about.

Andy
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