Disastrous hard reboot of Mac

Well, I feel bad posting this. I have been an ardent Macintosh fan ever since Obul converted me in the year 2000. But of late, there have been an increasing number of things very un-Maclike happening with my Mac and iPhone.

Twice in the recent past, I have had to hard reboot my laptop (a MacBook Pro). A hard reboot means holding the power button down for 5 seconds and shutting down the laptop without shutting down from the operating system.

I had to do this because some application would misbehave and hang and also cause other applications to hang in the process. Slowly the whole system became unusable. So, you do not have any option but to hard reboot. Earlier, the OS would not allow any misbehaving app to effect the other apps. Not so recently.

Now I can live with that once in a way. What I wasn't prepared for was the unintended consequences of this action.

When I powered up again, to my shock and horror, my settings of most applications had disappeared.

For example, my email had to be reconfigured. My email files were all there in the file system but the Mail application could not see them. I had to import all the emails. My music is gone from iTunes. The files again are all there but I can't see them from iTunes. My Firefox bookmarks have disappeared. My dock is back to what it was when I installed the OS. All my stickies are gone.

This is a real pain.

For the most part, the data is recoverable but this is not how things should be on a Mac. You could be excused if this happened on a PC. But not on a Mac.

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