The G5 has been crashing a lot lately; I complained about Adium being unstable, well it got to the point where I had to move back to an older build of the Alpha. Granted that we are talking about an alpha build of an application and the fact that it can run 24/7 normally without problems is pretty impressive.
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)
An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.
Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.
When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.
I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
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maxplanar - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
I had a problem once with a disappearing cursor, turned out to be a USB hub issue - I have millions of them , cascading left ritgh and centre out of stuff. One of them was somewhat impure. As regards drivers, I've used both M$ and Logitech mice, with and without drivers. You don't need a driver for any mouse on OSX, the drivers just add product-specific features.jeffosx - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Hasnt the final verdict already been reached? There was mention of an Apple HW section on Anandtech. Dont you need a Mac for that purpose?Anonymous - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
hmm...just say Anand, a tad easier (-:OoTLink - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I can hardly wait for this week to end to hear Mr. Shrimpi's final verdict O_O it's begining to make me wonder hehe.Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
I second #37's suggestion to relaunch the Finder. It is the least stable part of OS X in my experience. It's actually less stable than it was in OS 9 but a lot easier to relaunch than the restart needed in OS 9. Just:Command(Apple) + Option(alt) + Escape
OS 9's Finder would start to get flakey after renaming a few hundred files - in OS X it only takes 100 or so. Hogwasher is also apt to cause instability in the Finder... it, in my opinion, is by far the most intuitive Mac newsreader... and less invasive than Unison. Thoth is the poster's choice (because of the availability of auto-posters) - Hog the reader's.
Find it here: www.asar.com
Finally, there is a campaign running to try to keep Thoth alive by prepaying for updates - you'll find talk in the .mac newsgroups.
wassup4u2 - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Hey I really like the 'AT News Updates'... they help keep boring classes interesting ;-)the best - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
RELAUNCH THE FINDER.About the disappearing mouse cursor, instead of rebooting the whole computer you can try only rebooting the Finder. Amazing notion, but the desktop in OSX is only an application that can be relaunched. Your apps won't be affected.
As for the instability, Adium is probably to blame.
japtor - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
just wondering, is anand using a 3rd party mouse driver or usb overdrive or something? i know the ms and logitech drivers have caused some problems for people in the past.Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Sorry for the DP.My point was, I think a new user such as Anand having a utility like this would impair them from really learning the ins and outs of the file system, GUI, etc. Don't you think it better to learn how the guts of the beast work before switching over to shortcuts and 3rd party tools? PARTICULARLY someone who is in the position of REVIEWING the OS for a large audience of readers?
Anonymous - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
Everyone who mentions LaunchBar in all these comments:S.T.F.U.
I use and love LaunchBar, but that comes from being a seasoned Mac user. Someone new to the OS should take time, and not just one month, to really get comfortable with the OS and filesystem before using utilities like this.
So just leave Anand alone already.