OS Crashes
My 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.
September 28th, 2003 at 5:05 am
Not to diminish the magnitude of the inconvenience or to invalidate your frustration, but the two items you describe may not, in fact, be OS X crashes in the literal sense.
When the computer will not wake from sleep, it is a hardware problem. Maybe a hard drive that will not spin up, or some PRAM that has become corrupted. Technically, the OS hasn’t even had a chance yet to perform. It is not yet active, so it is not in a state where it can crash. But, that doesn’t mean there’s no problem, of course. There has been a breakdown somewhere in the overall system, which includes the whole of the machine. You are having a Mac problem. It’s sort of like if your alarm clock failed to go off and you didn’t wake up on time; you woudn’t consider it a failure of your conscious mind. Maybe the power went out in the night or something. It would be analogous to an OS crash only if it turns out you forgot to set the alarm before you went to sleep.
As for the shutting-down thing, I’ve experienced that when my external FireWire drive had spun down while not in use and somehow missed the signal from the computer that says, “wakeup and unmount, we’re shutting down!” As long as it was still mounted, the computer could not shut down. When I unplugged the drive’s FireWire cable after 10 minutes or so, OS X finished shutting down immediately. Sometimes it takes longer to shutdown/restart than other times, but if that little spinning gear progress indicator is still spinning in the lower center of the screen, then the system has not crashed. Chances are it means that the system is waiting for something, and in your case, I think it’s that Western Digital drive you put in. That drive could also be responsible for preventing the system from waking up from sleep.
At the point where these system-wide problems stack up and things fall apart, I know it doesn’t matter a bullfrog’s hefty hind quarters whether it was technically an OS X crash or not. Because no matter what, in that moment, it was a showstopper! But, if you are logging computer problems in order to divine a clearer picture over time, it’s important that you record them as accurately as possible and consider more than just the OS you are running as a culprit. Here’s how to identify a true kernel panic.
Now, I don’t think it was pure coincidence that your problems occurred while you were using Mac OS X. In your post, you mention going 8 months with only 7 crashes under OS 9. But, your current operating system isn’t the only difference between then and now. You are on an entirely new piece of hardware now. And, one that has been modified with a hard drive you already didn’t trust before you installed it. That’s a modification everyone’s grandma won’t necessarily be doing. Of course, they & you should be able to perform simple upgrades like that and have them just work. It’s a Mac, right? Well, all I can say is, there’s a reason why almost every employee on Apple’s Austin campuses has a tech-support related job. The Mac is a wonderful system, but it isn’t perfect.
Speaking of…, you’re still within your 90 days of free tech support on your new PowerMac. Call Apple and get everything you can out of that time. And, especially if you have reason to believe there is a problem with the hardware beyond a simple hard drive issue, then for the love of Jeebus, get it sorted out now while the machine is under early warranty and the phone calls are free!
We gotta get you back to loving your Mac!
Giles
September 28th, 2003 at 10:40 am
(Visualizing a bullfrog’s hefty hind quarters)
September 29th, 2003 at 3:41 pm
Gee… I can’t remember the last time my Windows XP boxes crashed…
(Of course, I’m not running MIDI stuff, etc.)
…but still, I can’t remember. Really. They haven’t in recent memory. I know that you don’t believe me, but they haven’t.
Honest.
Cross my heart, swear on a stack of iBooks.
September 29th, 2003 at 3:44 pm
But, to give you the benefit of the doubt… as posted in my blog, I had extremely few crash problems when I was caretaker of a PowerBook for a few months. Could it be that you’re installing some extra things that make it crash?