Question: options when keyboard/mouse connection lost

[takosan]

Greetings!

My friends bought an iMac about a month ago and recently it lost keyboard/mouse connection during routine operations. Good thing that they bought AppleCare so they called in. However, when AppleCare stepped through the process of exchanging batteries and doing some keystroke to establish link, it didn't help and they advised to do a hard reset with the power button.

Shutting down in that manner seems risky to me ... doesn't it risk data corruption? Are there any other ways to shut down gracefully instead (with keyboard also loosing connection I don't know what else)?

Also my friends tell me that AppleCare said they've gotten a "lot" of calls but no root cause has been identified since every case seems to be attributed to something different ... in my friends case the batteries taken out seems to still have power so I wonder what causes these disconnects?

Thanks for any inputs/opinions/experiences on this matter!

Regards,
Takosan

 

[cerote]

Hook up a usb mouse if you want to shut down properly. Hard Booting shouldn't really hurt anything unless you are actually doing something on the computer.

 

[87vert]

Greetings!
Shutting down in that manner seems risky to me ... doesn't it risk data corruption?

It does not but due to the Mac's running a Journaled file system the risk is much much lower than a windows pc.

A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of the changes that will be made in a journal (usually a circular log in a dedicated area of the file system) before committing them to the main file system. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems are quicker to bring back online and less likely to become corrupted.

 

[takosan]

cerote: thank you for the tip! Yes, my friends should have an USB mouse from windoze system they also use so that'll be their backup.

87vert: thank you for the explanation of the journaling system that OSX uses. I understand why it is less likely to corrupt.

Happy holidays to you both!

Takosan