Filed under: Hardware, OS, Software, Tips and tricks
Apple Support doc: Mac maintenance Quick Assist
Apple has released a "Mac Maintenance Quick Assist" support document that is more or less a 10-step guide aimed at beginners for taking care of their Mac, both inside and out. These steps include good, basic practices such as using relevant names for files instead of "DSC_00001.jpg," while also recommending that you occasionally clean your Mac (duh).I was surprised to see a few tips make this list, however. The first: Check for viruses. "Macs don't get anywhere near the amount of viruses that Windows PCs are prone to, but that doesn't mean that they can't get infected," reads tip #8. I guess the guys who wrote this article didn't get the memo from the team who made the "Macs don't get viruses" TV commercials. The other odd tips deal with Mac maintenance stuff, like repairing permissions and defragging your hard drive. I was under the impression that, since Panther, Mac OS X defragged itself. On the permissions topic, there has been a lot of chatter over the last couple of months about whether repairing permissions is actually useful. Just check out the pseudo-series John Gruber had on the topic.
All in all, I think I was actually a little frightened by evidence of even cheesier one-liners making their way into Apple's support docs: "As a Mac user, you won't have to do windows, but you will need to do some housekeeping!" Yuk yuk.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
USTommyMC said 2:11PM on 5-08-2006
Macs may not be affected by virus but that doesn't mean that they can't get infected. We could easily get an infected email or document that we could pass on to our poor Windows using colleages.
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Jonathan Allen said 2:32PM on 5-08-2006
I agree about apple being a little too "cute" lately.
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dogfriend said 3:31PM on 5-08-2006
Quote from John Gruber:
"Amidst other tips for morons such as keeping your desktop tidy, wiping dust off your computer, and giving your documents sensible file names, this Apple support document recommends running Repair Disk Permissions periodically. Just because it appears in a goofy support article doesn?t mean it?s gospel."
LOL.
The question I have about scanning for viruses: How many are there and how exactly are we supposed to scan for them if there aren't any virus definitions for OS X viruses?
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jason said 4:04PM on 5-08-2006
The issue I had with the mac and viruses, is that we use office, and somebody got a macro virus from someone else. then this macro virus was infecting every document they opened, so it was quite annoying. ClamAV did find the virus, but it didn't clean it. So I had to get Norton for the mac and clean it up.
So #3, go get ClamAV to find em, and if you need to, get something else (like norton, or trendmicro) to clean em.
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Richard H. said 4:05PM on 5-08-2006
Spotlight is a major new feature in Tiger and supposedly changes the way we organize and search for files. "With Spotlight, you always find what you?re looking for, even if you don?t know where to look." But according to this help document, we still need to be concerned with where we put things so we can "easily find them". Perhaps Apple technical support should read the marketing memos.
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James said 4:46PM on 5-08-2006
Why rename your photos when iPhoto organizes them automatically and of course needs the files named how they were on the camera to find them?
Why make a backup of a file just to delete the original file thus making the backup the sole copy, not a backup.
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