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Showing posts from 2019

"Should I Update My Old Mac from High Sierra to Mojave?"

If you rely on old hardware or on old software you can't update, I suggest you leave Mojave alone. You're likely to run into a number of more or less serious incompatibilities without gaining much to compensate. In my own case, I had enough problems that I wound up downgrading from Mojave to High Sierra -- the first time I've ever had to revert to an earlier version of the operating system. Here are a few specific reasons you might want to stick to High Sierra. 1. Sketchy support for older Macs. With my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, I had to temporarily disconnect all internal drives except the boot drive before I could install or reinstall Mojave. Otherwise, the installer would stop partway through with an error message. Also, Mojave required a firmware update that caused some sort of error with the saving of startup disk info. TinkerTool System identifies it as a problem with NVRAM, and though the Mac starts up on the correct disk, shutdown times can be unusually slow when swit

"How Do I Stop Adobe Background Processes from Launching at Startup on My Mac?"

Adobe's Creative Cloud app is like a virus, and a poorly programmed one at that. Though the app needs a number of background processes when it's running, they don't need to launch before then, and especially not when you start your Mac. But how do you stop them? And beyond that, how do you keep Adobe from restoring them? Most of these processes -- all of which you can identify in the Mac's Activity Monitor by the Adobe logo -- are launched at startup by files known as launchagents and launchdaemons. There are three main locations where Adobe installs these: Library/LaunchAgents/ Library/LaunchDaemons/ Users/[Your Username]/Library/LaunchAgents/ (If you don't know how to reach the hidden Library directory, pull down the Go menu in Finder while you're pressing the Option key.) The names of the files that launch Adobe processes all start with "com.adobe", and NONE of these files are essential. Most of the advice you'll find on this topic sim

"Why Is My Mac Having Wi-Fi Problems After Updating to Mojave?"

A number of people have reported having Wi-Fi problems after updating to Mojave, and I did myself, with a disturbing lost connection in the middle of a big download. That's something I'm not used to. What I discovered was that Mojave had re-ordered my Preferred Networks. What really was causing the trouble was that I was now connected to a 2.4GHz network instead of my usual 5GHz. A 2.4 GHz network will often be subject to more interference than 5GHz, so the connection is more likely to fail. And sure enough, when I switched networks, the connection was fine. If you're having trouble, the first thing to do is check the network you're connected to and switch it manually if it's wrong. You can do this with the Wi-Fi pull-down menu on the menubar (if you have it there) or on the Network panel of System Preferences. It's common for a wireless router to offer both 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections, and you want to make sure you're on the one that has worked best for

"Why Does the Mojave Installer Fail on my Old Mac Pro with the Message 'The Installer Resources Were Not Found'?"

When it comes to new versions of MacOS, I'm not exactly an early adopter. In fact, I usually wait about nine months before daring to move over. That's usually how long it takes for all the bugs to get worked out of the MacOS version and all the software that's going to be updated for it. For Mojave, though, I wanted at least a sneak peak, because I wanted to see if my 2010 Mac Pro and aging software could weather the transition at all, or whether I was stuck at High Sierra. So, I installed Mojave on a test partition when it first came out of beta, and after playing with it enough to allay my fears, I forgot about it. Until recently, when I tried to update it for more testing. Then I found I couldn't. The installer kept failing with the message, "MacOS could not be installed on your computer. The installer resources were not found." So, one of the Mojave updates beween 10.14 and 10.14.4 had a bug in the installer, because someone at Apple wasn't paying

"Why Won't My Mac Pro Restart After the Latest Software Update?"

I have a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, and after downloading a High Sierra security update from the App Store last night, trying to restart landed me on a black screen with a cursor, and that's all. I could power down by holding down the power button and then boot back up, but my next attempts to restart failed the same way. Checking online, I saw that the update included new EFI firmware, and that gave me a clue how to fix it. My boot volume was on a Sandisk SSD, but I had another system volume on an original Apple SSD meant for this Mac Pro. For past firmware updates to this machine, I'd had to boot into the Apple SSD volume to get the firmware installed. So, I tried that again, and sure enough, I was able to download the update and restart, with the update proceeding just fine. Unfortunately, this boot volume didn't have my latest files. So, back I went to my Sandisk SSD volume, used SuperDuper to copy all files to the Apple SSD volume, then booted back into that and updated it