WHY DID EL CAPITAN
STOP GETTING
SECURITY UPDATES?
Apple stopped providing full
security updates for 10.11 over a
year ago, but still pushes
“silent” updates to its security
tools. Open the App Store pane
and ensure “Automatically
check for updates” and “Install
system data files and security
updates” are both checked.
DOES A SAFE BOOT CHECK
MY DISKS FOR ERRORS?
This depends on the macOS
version. In Mojave and earlier,
checks are run, any error
repaired and your Mac
automatically restarted, but
there’s no way to discover what
happened. This isn’t true in
Catalina, though. If you want
to check properly, start up
in Recovery Mode and run
Disk Utility there.
HOW CAN I GET SPOTLIGHT
TO REINDEX MY DISK?
Open Spotlight and select
Privacy. Click on “+”, add your
disk to that list, or drag and
drop it onto the window to
remove indexes. Then select
it and click on “–” to remove it,
forcing new indexes to be built.
WHY DOES DISK UTILITY
SHOW TWO VOLUMES
IN 10.15?
Catalina creates a new Volume
Group, consisting of: a writable
volume named Macintosh HD
— Data containing your own
apps, Home folder, and more; a
read–only volume named
Macintosh HD for system files.
These don’t appear to be known issues with
Catalina, suggesting that you have third–
party software installed which is causing
a conflict, or that your upgrade wasn’t
completely successful. Recent versions of
macOS have also altered the dwell time that
you need to hold a click or a tap for a Finder
item to be ready to move.
If you have any product which customizes
the Finder in any way, adding Finder Quick
Actions or modifying its dialogs such as
those for opening and saving files, try
updating, disabling or uninstalling it. One
prime candidate for this is an older version
of Default Folder X, which will need updating.
This can be hard to identify, but two
tricks which can help are starting up in
safe mode, with the Shift key held, and
creating a new user account to see if
that’s also affected. If that second account
turns out to be fine, then you know that
it’s something installed in the Library of
your Home folder.
If you draw a blank with those, try
reinstalling the latest version of macOS
Catalina, using a fresh installer app obtained
from the App Store and Software Update.
Another reliable way to do this is by
entering macOS Recovery with Cmd+R held
at startup on a wired keyboard.
> Flawed Finder in Catalina
After upgrading to Catalina, some Finder actions don’t work properly. Using the Move
to Bin command in the pop–up menu sometimes doesn’t work, and trying to drag a file
from one folder to another is also intermittently successful. How can I fix those?
Check when you’ve started up in safe mode by selecting the software item in System Information.
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78 APR 2020 maclife.com