Tag: os

Saturday, 20 December 2014

iPad 2 and iOS 8: How to fix the slowdown

by Smiorgan Comments Off on iPad 2 and iOS 8: How to fix the slowdown

This is a public service announcement. If you love your iPad2 as I do (all those tasty, tasty game PDFs) but after updating to iOS8 found that it now has the responsiveness of a brick, here’s what you can do:

  1. Reset the network by going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings. This will clear out all the networks and passwords remembered on your device (you do know at least your home WiFi password, don’t you?)
  2. Turn off WiFi Networking by going Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Wifi Networking and set it to Off.
  3. Reduce animations by going Settings > General > Accessibilty > Reduce Motion and set it to On.

I don’t know which of these had the biggest effect; I suspect the first one. iPad is now perfectly usable now, when previously browsing was impossible and even typing was a painful experience. YMMV, of course.

Sunday, 23 June 2013

Mountain Lion Beach Ball

by Smiorgan Comments Off on Mountain Lion Beach Ball

I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion on my Macbook Pro last year, and since then I’ve had no end of grief with the machine locking up with the beach ball of death. I was ready this morning to do a fresh install of the OS or even roll back to Snow Leopard–but in a last-chance attempt at resurrecting the installation I did a couple of things. One of these was to clear out the applications folder including the Flash installation.

The other thing I did was to go into the recovery console (hold command-R at boot) and repair the disk permissions on the drive. The list of repairs was extensive–possibly it was a legacy from the Snow Leopard upgrade.

Taking these actions has removed the cruft of unused applications and so far I’ve not seen much of the beach ball. For anyone else thinking about something as drastic as wipe and reinstall, maybe this post will save you a morning. I’ll update in a month or so.

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Mountain Lion

by Smiorgan 1 Comment on Mountain Lion

I’m going to sound like a dreadful fanboy now, but I just got Mountain Lion, and I really like it.

Screen Shot 2012 07 31 at 17 40 10

Since my rant on Windows 8 I’ve been eager to see Apple’s effort, hopeful that 10.8 will be the evolutionary, rather than revolutionary release that is expected of the even numbers. Evolutionary because there was a lot I liked when I tried out Lion – I don’t want those features to change.

I’ve also been expecting my macbook to turn into a smouldering slag-heap where Windows 8 pixies dance and point and laugh at me. So far, this has not happened.

Briefest of rundowns on the new system:

  • Really great multi-touch
  • Better, more precise and responsive bluetooth trackpad
  • Mission Control replaces Spaces – after a bit of practice, I vastly prefer the new desktop
  • Full-screen apps dynamically taking their own Space on the virtual desktop
  • Lauchpad – iOS-like way to select apps, seamlessly integrated with the rest of the desktop

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p>Downsides? It does seem some of my apps take longer to load now. I don’t know if that’s because the new system is optimised for SSD, or if some core apps are cached for fast loading but the majority of my apps aren’t. Time Machine seems to take a bit longer to start.

The rest of it I can take or leave – the new versions of Mail et al look good and it’s nice that they operate in the way I’d expect to find them on the iPad.

I’m waiting for something bad to happen but so far all my writing apps work and the desktop seems stable. If I were using the mac for more complex creative stuff (like music) I would probably be a bit cautious with the upgrade. My reckless upgrade cost me £13.99.