Mac Users Forum

Joe, NeoOffice can open garden variety .doc MS Word documents. If you encounter the Office 2007 files with the .docx extension, you need to get the OpenXML converter. Get it here. It is a real PITA, and I think it is impolite for people to use the .docx files for anything that has to outside to anybody else, because a whole lot of people can't deal with them without a converter. I have never had a problem opening any PDFs, the Preview program that comes with OS X has been able to handle any PDFs I have encountered. Am I missing something?
 
Here is some interesting information from the ClamXav site. It confirms there are NO known viruses affecting OS X, but points out two things: (1) you might want to scan files and emails for virsus so you don't pass them on to your Windows-using friends, and (2) if you run a virtual Windows PC on your Mac, that is susceptible as well. So maybe you do want to run ClamXav.

Back in the days before OS X, the number of viruses which attacked Macintosh users totalled somewhere between about 60 and 80. Today, the number of viruses actively attacking OS X users is...NONE! However, this doesn't mean we should get complacent about checking incoming email attachments or web downloads, for two reasons. Firstly, there's no guarantee that we Mac users will continue to enjoy the status quo, but more importantly, the majority of the computing world use machines running MS Windows, for which an enormous quantity of viruses exist, so we must be vigilant in checking the files we pass on to our friends and colleagues etc. For example, if you're a wise person and you've turned MS Office's macro support off then you're not going to notice that virus which is hiding inside this month's edition of Extreme Ironing.doc which your friend sent you. If you then forward that document to a less wise person who has not turned off the macro support, then you have most likely just sent him a shiny new Pandora's Box with a sign saying "Open this end"!

Flippancy aside, I'm sure you get the idea: check the file before opening and/or sending it on to someone else. This gives you the opportunity to avoid the file altogether or at least copy and paste any vital information into a new document and send that instead.

Don't forget, if you run VirtualPC you can still become infected and lose valuable data on your Mac even though technically you're running Windows inside a sandbox. VPC will run any application you tell it to, virus or no virus, it doesn't know the difference. You can protect yourself slightly by not using VPC's "shared folders", but that's a useful feature which you shouldn't have to be without.
 
Firefox is good, but Camino is, in some ways, better. It is built on the same Mozilla Gecko engine as Firefox but is optimized for OS X. One drawback is that it will not accept 3rd party extensions like Firefox.

Warren
 
Here's what happened to my newish unibody MacBook earlier this week. Still can't figure it out...

I tapped the mouse to wake it up from sleep. The computer woke up and there was immediately a kernel panic. Restarted. Computer took a while on the screen with the Apple logo and spinning icon thingy. Computer restarted again. As soon as the screen with the Apple logo popped up there was another kernel panic. This repeated many times.

I booted from an external drive and the computer ran fine but the internal hard drive would not mount. Disk Utility recognized it but couldn't open it. Ran TechTool and everything checked out, except for the "volume structure." TechTool repaired the volume structure and the hard drive mounted just fine. Computer seems to work fine, although I did experience another kernel panic today.

So, what's wrong? The SMART status of my hard drive checks out okay, but is my drive about to die? I don't really care, because I can just go over to the Apple Store and get a new drive put in under warranty, boot from an external drive, and copy everything over. But I can't take a working computer over to them and expect a replacement. So any advice would be appreciated.
 
Yeah, Sam - hardware CAN fail on Macs too! Maybe I have built them up a bit too much! :lol:

Doryman":1re2n64q said:
Hard drives are cheap -- replace it. Why trust an unstable device? I'm sure you have better things to do.

Warren
Click to expand...
 
Pat Anderson":2izjuev1 said:
Yeah, Sam - hardware CAN fail on Macs too! Maybe I have built them up a bit too much! :lol:
Click to expand...

Feh...anything that makes people think twice about the Redmond monster, is good stuff. :mrgreen:

I'm perhaps not they typical "switch" poster child, but there has been a decided migration to OS X in the Da Nag household. I specify "OS X" and not "Mac", as we're only batting .500 when it comes to Steve and Co.'s hardware.

It started a few months back with a MacBook Pro, provided by employer...we're paying lip service to investigating non-MS desktops, even though it makes no sense in our environment. Still, my positive experience with OS X, led me to build two Hackintoshes - generic hardware running tweaked versions of OS X. One is the Dell Mini 9 I wrote about a while back, the other a custom built clone assembled with parts known to have a high degree of OS X compatibility. While both of these are working admirably with only a few minor glitches, I just couldn't help myself...and picked up one of the new Mac Minis a couple days ago. Bumped the RAM to 4GB and upgraded to a larger/faster hard drive, and it's one sweet little box. It's my daily driver right now, and I couldn't be happier.

What drove me to all of this from the Linux desktops I've raved about in the past? Truthfully...sheer laziness. I'm quite capable of getting everything I need working in a Linux environment, but I've just more important things to do with my limited free time. I'm finding OS X to be a wonderful combination of drop dead easy to deal with, but without giving up the "under the cover" nerd stuff in the process. And of course, none of the Microsoft irks and limitations suffered by many.

I'm not 100% converted, but not for lack of trying - I don't need nor want to be. There are several things I like better about Linux on the desktop, so I just run an Ubuntu VM under VirtualBox on the Mac for those tasks.

And lastly...I'm just finding the Apple tools to be a ton of fun. When asked by my wife to whip up something from a bunch of pictures taken at a recent Weimraraner Rescue gathering, it wasn't work...it was a blast! I'm far from an artsy-fartsy type, but in less than 30 minutes, I whipped up the following for her:

NCWR Carmel Weim Walk
 
I'll replace the hard drive sometime in the near future. Right now it's working fine, and I've got backups of everything, so even if it dies right now I wouldn't lose anything. In fact, with the Mac I could boot the computer from an external drive and keep working like usual until I had the time to go pick up a replacement drive. We've had a ton of hard drives die-on both Macs and PCs. I'll be very happy once SSD's are available in large sizes at reasonable prices.
 
RE backups/restores: I picked up one of these from Amazon with my new Mac Mini, along with the larger hard drive. It's cheap, and makes many backup/restore/data transfer tasks a piece of cake. Basically, it allows most any hard drive to be accessed over USB.

After upgrading the hard drive in the Mac Mini, I attached this adaptor to the old drive, and hooked it up to one of the Mini's USB ports. From there, I simply booted off the OS X install DVD, and used the Disk Utility to copy the original drive contents to the new, upgraded internal drive. Rebooted and I was done.

It was harder to type the above, than it was to do it... :mrgreen:

For the non-Mac folks in the audience thinking of switching, you might also read up on Time Machine. Included with every new Mac, it's without a doubt, the easiest backup/restore/disaster recovery software I've encountered - and I've seen a bunch of them. Simply plug in a cheap external USB drive, and Time Machine continuously backs up everything. Lose a file from an hour/day/week/month ago? A few clicks and it's back. Hard drive crashed? Install a new one, insert your OS X install DVD, and "restore from Time Machine Backup" is one of your options...a couple clicks, and you're back in business once the restore is complete.

Good stuff.
 
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