[P1] Ttly OT: Fiji exercises internet censorship !!!

[Jack Rodgers]

on 7/3/03 5:37 AM, Pat D. Stephens at patdart at cox-internet.com wrote:

> Would someone tell me the difference of a 'forced reboot' and a 'soft
> reboot'?  Apple tech taught me to use a soft reboot years ago when
> things went wrong...aren't they different things?

This is one of those areas where people use less than accurate words to 
describe actions and thus the definition will depend upon who is trying 
to provide an answer.

Various platforms might refer to a similar action with different jargon 
and then when people switch they take the jargon with them. As long as 
I know what the various techniques are and in which order to try them, 
I don't care what anyone calls them and often I change my mind on what 
to call them. Other people may not.

What to do really depends on how you trouble shoot the problem and what 
you learn in the process.

The final step should be the reboot, regardless of what you call it. 
Shutting down or pulling the plug may leave the read write head in a 
bad place instead of parking it safely and lead to drive damage. I 
would assume but not know for sure that rebooting leaves the drive 
spinning and the head not dragging on the disk.

Before that I would try the unplug the USB techniques to see if that 
unfreezes anything, the mouse often gets stuck in the upper left corner 
when there is a USB problem with the keyboard/mouse.

Then or maybe before I would try to quit the application, then drag to 
the dock to see if I can switch out of the application, then a force 
quit, and so on.

Only after trying numerous actions and not accomplishing anything would 
I force a reboot since I will lose unsaved data and may even damage 
some files as often happens in Filemaker.

Oh, Apple doesn't use reboot and you won't find any apple help using 
the Help menu in the finder for reboot. But you will find tons for 
restart. So, we should probably call it a forced restart.

---
The 2003 campaign begins...
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JackRodgers at earthlink.net