What can I do to prevent data loss in PDFs on MacBook Air Preview?

Not so easy nowadays! There is, afaik, no icon for the ‘whole drive’? So I dragged the Desktop. No ‘-‘. No obvious window to close, but I think I must have. I can cancel, but not ‘close’ the Sysstem settings box/window.

My efforts seem to have changed a few things. Waking from. sleep now insists I tap the blind top right button. Everything is now a lot slower and clumsier than before….

No sign of anything to tell me I’ve stumbled into Safe mode or not.

It is already a pdf, so I’m just saving it. This time I renamed it and used the Preview printing method, which blessedly allowed me to put the pages back into landscape (I couldn’t see how to do this in Acrobat). Still had at least eleven blank pages though!

Hi Luis, fwiw my first words on this were:

"Hi, my 13” 1.1 Ghz intel macbook air..."

More recently, I’ve just discovered that my only drive has called itself ‘System’. It does indeed have the operating system on it, but my various works dwarf the system, as the old-time “Joe Smoke’s Mac” seemed to accept !

The computer seems to have woken up somewhat, not as slow and clumsy as it was half an hour ago.

Page 7 of the 15-page sub-set is still all-white, thumbnail and image, and in the last few moments it has taken out page 8 as well!

So for clarify, I’ve an Intel Mac, with no red writing to do with its system. So the safe mode operation, in which I began by following the instructions on the help system, has had a few effects, but none of them useful as yet! I still have the silly won’t wake up unless you tap the blind button, and it is still a good bit slower than before, so doing graphic work is pretty hellish – the tools blunder on long after I’ve stopped moving my cursor.

I’m searching for a folder titled ‘VISA’ – all upper-case. I don’t see any option to direct Spotlight to any part in particular of my stuff? It never gets a mention, but is in only the third level from the top in Documents.

Using the search process top right of the windows I can direct the search to “Documents”. No file is found. But II can find it quickly.

The editing I’m doing is cleaning up the images at the pixel level. The original was a Black-on white image, sometimes I need to reduce the file back to black and white, and insist that the whole page is treated as an image. I usually wind up with pages which are a lot easier to read and use, and about one tenth of the size of the original.

I do the editing in Graphic Converter, using Preview to assemble a series of images into an ordered list, to which I hope I shall find a way to make a Bookmark index, as I used to dow when Acrobat Pro was affordable. It looks as though one can modify Acrobat Reader to offer this, but no use if I can’t get the preparation sorted.

Bookmarks is a brilliant way to make the contents of a long file accessible.

I’ll have another heave at a Safe mode restart ...

Thanks for every one’s patience with this! Best regards, Tony

As I fired up again this morning I was once again offered a pop-up – which I see I can paste here using Command-V. Not brilliantly helpful, as it has pasted far too large for any one to make sense of. With that and the mysteriously unpredictable layout of this forum I wonder whether my batty Mac is messing with this, too. The pop-up appears to me to belong in the “When did you stop beating your wife” category. Sundry non-sequitur questions, like "do you want to sign in” but the only linked reply insists I want to sign in as somebody else? You’d think Apple would know that my Air doesn’t have Touch ID, so if the red splodge is a link I cannot use it. In the event ‘Cancel’ got me a window in which I could enter my Apple ID – not very rational!:

I think the computer may have been a second-hand ‘reconditioned’ one brought over from the US by one of my daughters. Quite early on I spotted the non-Apple battery, but it seems to have an adequate charge capability, so I’ve not worried about it. I don’t know how one would ’service’ such a battery. On my 1st-gen Honda Insight I got quite involved with ’servicing its NiMh battery, but that is not really the same thing!

The ‘poor performance’ is a bit short of detail! It certainly shows funny habits from time to time. It went through a time of running its fan a lot of the time, but it is quieter nowadays.

I’ve come across kernel panics before, but I don’t really know what they are! Its loudspeakers appear both to have failed, and only one of the replacements work. For a while any sound it chose to emit was dreadfully distorted, but the single surviving speaker seems ok.

Best regards, Tony

P.S. is there a logic behind the placing of contributions to this forum? My most recent posts seem to be around the middle, and it is usually unclear to what I was referring. There must be a logic, but so far I’ve not found it!

I ran Etrecheck, and learned that I am indeed in Safe mode. There was a report, but I see no "additional text" button via which I could paste it?

Best, T.

It has all gone pink! What does this indicate?

I’m looking for the Additional text button. Here is a screenshot of the box I’m invited to write in:

I’m hoping to send an Etrecheck

report...