I hate computers,

Sometimes.
I spent hours yesterday looking at what was wrong with my computer, it would boot, then shut down, then it would not even post and when it did, The bios screen looked corrupted.

i stripped the machine apart from CPU, and noticed that the USB 3 connector was iffy, one of the pins fell out, I can't see that being the problem, but it explains why one of the front panel usb sockets was intermittent.
I reset the bios and still no go. I was ready to buy another motherboard, I don't want to at the moment. Anyway, after a coffee and some food, I turned it on again, and it worked fine.

Flipping computers and people wonder why I am thinking of getting a nice simple Apple Mac mini.

CPU not overheating is it?

I thought that, but nope, done a ten-minute test with cinebench and the CPU got to 61 Celsius max and no throttling, so certainly not that, even the CPU fan did not increase in speed that much.
I restored a back-up of windows, and it seems to be better, but still strange why the UEFI corrupted. I know the machine is over 4 years old, but that is not that old compared to some.
I reset the bios, I would update it, but the later updates are not recommended with my CPU.

Oh well, I am going to go for a walk into town and meet a friend for a coffee or something stronger.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Flipping computers and people wonder why I am thinking of getting a nice simple Apple Mac mini.

Yeah, a sealed unit using laptop parts so if anything goes wrong there isn't anything you can do except pay Apple to fix.

I built PCs myself for years, but no longer see the point when you can go to PC Specialist, Chillblast, Scan, or others, and even the mass market Dell and Lenovo PCs are good for the majority.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 28-Nov-21 13:52:26)

Posted this in the Apple part of the forum last week. New announcement on self service repair:

https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/11/apple-anno...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

New announcement on self service repair:

Saw that, good news for the small independent phone shops. Will watch to see if it comes to Mac. I remember watching someone taking the glass out of a 27" iMac to change a failed HDD, insane amount of delicate work to replace a consumable component!

The press release reads as though it will be recent iPhones that will have it rolled out first, then eventually followed by M1 based Macs. Doesn’t appear to indicate whether they’ll make it retrospective beyond that. Apparently this will launch first in the states in the first part of the new year, then to other countries, with a view to a third party running it on behalf of Apple, so the leaks say…

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Yeah, a sealed unit using laptop parts so if anything goes wrong there isn't anything you can do except pay Apple to fix.

I built PCs myself for years, but no longer see the point when you can go to PC Specialist, Chillblast, Scan, or others, and even the mass market Dell and Lenovo PCs are good for the majority.

If I went for a PC update, I would certainly still go for the build my own way, add things to it inside and not void any warranty.
if i go for a Mac mini, then I know what it is and it is a machine that can not be updated internally. How often do Macs fail? I know someone who has a fair few of them and some are years old and still work.

How often do Macs fail? I know someone who has a fair few of them and some are years old and still work.

Some personal MacBook anecdotes:

1. Still have a 2010 MacBook Pro with factory SSD in pretty much perfect running order. I ran this one for almost 7 years straight. A few weeks ago I charged and spun it up and it was perfectly operational. SSD was fine.

2. Sold its predecessor, a 2007 17" MBP (2.4 GHz, 4G RAM, 160 GB mechanical HD) for £775 on eBay

3. Wife's 2016 13" MBP still running sweet

4. My mothers old 2012 MacBook Air was doing active service until last year, when my daughter who had inherited it after my mum passed, was gifted an M1 MBP. The front camera on the MBA had failed, everything else was fine.

5. Had a dead key / keyboard fail on my 2016 MBP earlier this year - 3 years out of standard warranty - Apple replaced the keyboard but also out of necessity the mainboard & CPU. What was an c.£669 retail repair they did as a free goodwill gesture.

6. I'm trading the MBP above now for £410 back ito Apple.

Avoid the old iMacs with mechanical hard drives and you should be fine.

Unless you get a faulty component e.g power supply then first year warranty should catch that.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Some personal MacBook anecdotes:

1. Still have a 2010 MacBook Pro with factory SSD in pretty much perfect running order. I ran this one for almost 7 years straight. A few weeks ago I charged and spun it up and it was perfectly operational. SSD was fine.

2. Sold its predecessor, a 2007 17" MBP (2.4 GHz, 4G RAM, 160 GB mechanical HD) for £775 on eBay

3. Wife's 2016 13" MBP still running sweet

4. My mothers old 2012 MacBook Air was doing active service until last year, when my daughter who had inherited it after my mum passed, was gifted an M1 MBP. The front camera on the MBA had failed, everything else was fine.

5. Had a dead key / keyboard fail on my 2016 MBP earlier this year - 3 years out of standard warranty - Apple replaced the keyboard but also out of necessity the mainboard & CPU. What was an c.£669 retail repair they did as a free goodwill gesture.

6. I'm trading the MBP above now for £410 back ito Apple.

There you go, that says it all. A friend have got a old G3, I think it is a G3, the one with the CRT monitor built in, still works.
I know there are Windows based machines that are years old and still running, a mate was using a 233 and a P4 machine until he passed away last year, but he had problems with them that had to be sorted out.
My next door neighbour told me a few weeks ago that she is still using a old HP machine that was there when her hubby left, now that was over 10 years ago, and they had it way before that. I did tell her that using Windows XP is maybe not a good idea with the work she does on it. but not my problem.

It just seems Windows based machines seems to have more problems.
like how on earth did a pin snap off an internal USB 3 connector that have-not been touched for around 3 years? The internal USB 3 connectors are awful anyway.

And exactly the same would apply to a PC.

There's nothing magic about Macs; they are not immune from hardware or software problems. It's true that they are very controlled systems, but if you run a Windows PC from a reputable manufacturer it should be just as reliable.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Avoid the old iMacs with mechanical hard drives and you should be fine.

Unless you get a faulty component e.g power supply then first year warranty should catch that.

I would anyway, since it is a M1 chip based Mac I am looking at, not really looking at Imacs, I have a decent monitor here and a imac would just take up space. The Mac mini I have been looking at, I did think about a Mac book pro, the best of both worlds.

This machine is still playing up, it is better than it was, but still things that are not working as it should be, maybe it is the main board on it's way out. But the machine is only just over 4 years old.

Replacing the hard drive in the older Minis was a nightmare. Of course, you can't change the drives, memory, video, just about anything in a modern Mac. All jobs that don't even require a screwdriver on my PC.

Don't get me wrong; I love my Mac Minis but only one of the three of them will run the newest versions of the OS. The PPC one is essentially useless (although I still use it from time to time to lay with PowerPC assembly language).

Horses for courses.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Replacing the hard drive in the older Minis was a nightmare. Of course, you can't change the drives, memory, video, just about anything in a modern Mac. All jobs that don't even require a screwdriver on my PC.

Agreed, I have replaced an HDD with an SSD in an old i7 quad core Mac Mini. Made a stunning difference, but not an easy feature at all. Of course the M1 Macs don't seem to have the boot from external media feature that the Intel Macs had. I liked that recovery mode.

Don't get me wrong; I love my Mac Minis but only one of the three of them will run the newest versions of the OS. The PPC one is essentially useless (although I still use it from time to time to lay with PowerPC assembly language).

I have an old MBAir (3rd gen) around which I hardly use now at over 7 years old, but it is going strong. My 6 year old Windows desktop is going strong, but just too old for Win11.

Horses for courses.

Yep.

Edited by jchamier (Mon 29-Nov-21 09:15:30)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

My 6 year old Windows desktop is going strong, but just too old for Win11.

All my PCs can run Windows 10 (even a cheap Tesco tablet), and my newest one can run 11.

My 2011 Mac Mini can't run Monterey or Big Sur. (I also added an SSD - and upgraded the RAM to 16GB - to that when one of the hard disks went west - tremendous difference.)

I have a 25 year old Athlon PC (self build) was running Windows 2000 now Windows XP. Bit slow to boot but still runs all the old games and programmes I require.

Laptop is a 12 year old Dell Studio 1555 (W7) upgraded with SSD a couple of years ago, boots and runs very quickly. Has a dedicated graphics card so renders video at a speed I'm happy with.

I suppose any electrical appliance can last a long time or it can break down relatively quickly.

My daughter's iPhone X has the dreaded "ghosting" issue and because it is over 3 years old Apple won't fix it for free. Sale Of Goods Act might push them to do something.

I don't think it will be 25 years, the Athlon was launched about 1999., so that would make it around 21 years if you got it from the launch date.

i remember the first Athlon, they were on boards, like the Pentium 2. I never had one of them.

I have a acer celeron laptop, have to be around 10 years old if not older, but I have misplaced the power brick, it is around here somewhere, but not that bothered.

Rendering must be really slow, which is fine if you only do short videos, it is not just the rendering, it is also the editing, it also depends on what you are using to edit with. A lot of video editors these days seems to be heavy on the resources, which is why I like Vegas, Adobe premier is awful, i don't understand why so many people use it.

I had a strange problem with this machine again, new Blueray drive did not recognise the new BD-R m-disk I got,, so I thought, just for a laugh as I had a problem with the Sata last week, I would move it to another sata port, and it works and also the computer seems to be responding better, very strange.

Now I will stick the machine back together again,

It was a guess at 25 years. Looks like it was 22, so not so far out.

Rendering is fairly fast using Pinnacle Studio 14. You have to use a separate drive to output the video as that gives faster results.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Flipping computers and people wonder why I am thinking of getting a nice simple Apple Mac mini.

Yeah, a sealed unit using laptop parts so if anything goes wrong there isn't anything you can do except pay Apple to fix.

I built PCs myself for years, but no longer see the point when you can go to PC Specialist, Chillblast, Scan, or others, and even the mass market Dell and Lenovo PCs are good for the majority.

whilst this is a late reply. I would not buy a dell pc[desktop] because of non upgrade-ability. Companies that use standard parts the way to go so the likes of scan, box or cclonline etc.

In reply to a post by Taras:

whilst this is a late reply. I would not buy a dell pc[desktop] because of non upgrade-ability. Companies that use standard parts the way to go so the likes of scan, box or cclonline etc.

If I was going to buy a pre-built PC then i would go for Scan, been using Scan for years for different bits. But then, if I was staying with the P.c side, I would build my own again.

The more i play with Windows 11, the more my mind is going to a Mac, I can tell you, people thought Vista was bad, I think windows 11 is worse in some ways.

In reply to a post by Taras:

whilst this is a late reply. I would not buy a dell pc[desktop] because of non upgrade-ability. Companies that use standard parts the way to go so the likes of scan, box or cclonline etc.

Chillblast, PC Specialist, and a range of other UK companies that build desktops / towers.

Go to Dell / Lenovo / Asus for laptops as you want world scale experience.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

The more i play with Windows 11, the more my mind is going to a Mac, I can tell you, people thought Vista was bad, I think windows 11 is worse in some ways.

In MacOS 12.x Monteray you can no longer drag files from the Finder (file manager) in list view. That sort of insanity keeps me away from Mac.

I'm using Monterey 12.1 and have no problem dragging and dropping files in list view.

Have I misunderstood your problem?

Edit: As a matter of interest, if you don't use MacOS how do you know about this (apparent) problem?

Edited by TinyMongomery (Sun 23-Jan-22 15:27:27)

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I'm using Monterey 12.1 and have no problem dragging and dropping files in list view. Have I misunderstood your problem?

Problem was evident yesterday on my friends M1 Macbook Air. Maybe it doesn't happen on Intel processors. My parents Mac Mini has the same problem.

Edit: As a matter of interest, if you don't use MacOS how do you know about this (apparent) problem?

I work in a team at work where 50% have Mac and 50% Windows machines; and I support many friends whom have Mac laptops. I own a Mac Mini M1 which is currently not in use as I have too much kit from the office for home working. My home PC is Windows, my work is all on Linux in the cloud.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 23-Jan-22 17:21:48)

I googled "can't drag and drop" but all the hits I found referred to problems on Windows. It certainly doesn't happen on my Mac mini (and I don't have such problems on my Windows computers either).

It’s a pain on the M1 MacBook Air, but no idea why.

Googling explicitly for "monterey m1 drag and drop" suggests you're not alone, but it doesn't seem to be widespread. Some suggestions (mostly relating to touchpad and haptic settings) in the results of the above might be worth a try.

Will pass on, thanks!

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In MacOS 12.x Monteray you can no longer drag files from the Finder (file manager) in list view. That sort of insanity keeps me away from Mac.

I sent this to a Mac owning friend who got herself another Mac , a M1 Imac and she has not seen the problem you have said about.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I sent this to a Mac owning friend who got herself another Mac , a M1 Imac and she has not seen the problem you have said about.

I'll get my friends with this issue to go see the local Apple store experts

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

The more i play with Windows 11, the more my mind is going to a Mac, I can tell you, people thought Vista was bad, I think windows 11 is worse in some ways.

In MacOS 12.x Monteray you can no longer drag files from the Finder (file manager) in list view. That sort of insanity keeps me away from Mac.

No sign of that issue here. Several children and me running Monterey on M1 based MacBooks.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I sent this to a Mac owning friend who got herself another Mac , a M1 Imac and she has not seen the problem you have said about.

I'll get my friends with this issue to go see the local Apple store experts

Not knowing much about Apple machines, I wonder if the OS did not install correctly and maybe a clean install would do the job.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Chillblast, PC Specialist, and a range of other UK companies that build desktops / towers.

Go to Dell / Lenovo / Asus for laptops as you want world scale experience.

Sadly you can't build your own lappy, yes i know projects exists but they are small town things

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Not knowing much about Apple machines, I wonder if the OS did not install correctly and maybe a clean install would do the job.

That is a good idea, a work colleague suggested looking to see if there is still such a thing as the "combo updater" and reapply the last patch level. Will have a look this weekend to see if relevant for M1 laptops.

In reply to a post by Taras:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Chillblast, PC Specialist, and a range of other UK companies that build desktops / towers.

Go to Dell / Lenovo / Asus for laptops as you want world scale experience.

Sadly you can't build your own lappy, yes i know projects exists but they are small town things

I looked at laptops last year, but to be honest I was not impressed with any of them.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Not knowing much about Apple machines, I wonder if the OS did not install correctly and maybe a clean install would do the job.

That is a good idea, a work colleague suggested looking to see if there is still such a thing as the "combo updater" and reapply the last patch level. Will have a look this weekend to see if relevant for M1 laptops.

Ok, what ever that is

In reply to a post by billford:

Googling explicitly for "monterey m1 drag and drop" suggests you're not alone, but it doesn't seem to be widespread. Some suggestions (mostly relating to touchpad and haptic settings) in the results of the above might be worth a try.

Once upon a time you'd go through the minor rigmarole of an SMC reset if there were intermittent issues that required saved system parameters too be reset.

As the SMC is no more with M1 based Macs (its built into the SoC)...may even be something as simple as disconnecting any peripherals, shutting down, then waiting a few seconds before powering up again. This effectively clears all saved system parameters that used to require the old 4-finger reboot on MacBooks...

I agree, unless you have a REAL need for a portable computer always get a desktop.