OS Crashes
Saturday, September 27th, 2003My good friend Giles likes blogs because they can be used to track information over time. I mean, if you’re already posting to it, why not post little snippets and things you may want to remember later?
About a month ago I broke down and bought a new OS X computer. My beloved G3/333 machine was almost to its 7th birthday and was starting to show signs of wear. Since I use my computer every single day and earn my living from it, having a reliable machine is of the utmost importance. I’m willing to pay a little more to get a quality machine (one of the reasons I use a Mac) and do everything I can to keep it in top running condition. I even scrape the hard drive back to “bare metal” every year and reinstall every bit and byte… just to keep virtual dustbunnies from moving in.
Well, the last month hasn’t all been wine and roses, my friends. I won’t bore you with the details, but in the first week I had to reinstall the OS 3 times. Once I got things working, it was much more stable, but I still don’t trust OS X like my old OS 9. I spent about $1350 on a new dual-boot 1.25Ghz machine. The so-called “uncrashable” OS X 10.2 has been anything but. Frequent lockups, 2 kernel panics so far, and various other little OS glitches. Frankly, I still haven’t moved the most critical data over to OS X. I do Quicken on the 9 partition and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Today alone I’ve had to force a reboot on OS X twice. Once when the computer wouldn’t wake from sleep, and just now when I tried to reboot into 9 to get some work done; the computer just hung during the reboot process and didn’t proceed. And don’t even get me started on my printer problems today. oog.
So I’m going to be posting to my blog whenever I have an OS X crash or other weirdness. I’ll include a short description of the problem for future reference. Since Movable Type lets me file under categories, I’ll be putting these under an “OS X CRASH” category. That way I can come back in a year or 6 months or whatever and see what the performance is like. I did something similar last year in OS 9. I wanted to see how many times my computer locked up in an 8 month period so I kept track. The total? On a 6 year old machine running OS 9.2, I had 7 crashes. In 8 months. I consider myself extremely experienced in OS 9 and can suss out and fix virtually any problem. I’m only moderately experienced in X so I haven’t learned the ins and outs of the OS yet. I’m willing to chalk some of this up to the learning curve, but if Apple wants to sell computers to everyone and their grandma, they need to do some serious stability work on their OS. Not every prospective Apple customer has a computer background or even cares about learning little OS repair/maintenance tricks.
I still believe that Apple makes the best computer out there. I no longer believe that they are as foolproof, crashproof, or errorproof as their marketing suggests. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, but the proof is in the numbers. Make me a believer, Apple. I’ll just report the crashes.
2 OS X crashes today. Once when it didn’t wake from sleep, once when I tried to reboot into 9 and it hung before it could quit out of X.