My new powerbook - 'Crashy'!

[neuby]

Used 10.1 two years ago and loved it - rock stable system - better even than WinXP.

Am now running Jaguar 10.2.6, and it crashes constantly - I feel that I am back to system 7 again.

Typical situation - have a few programs open (I have 768 M Ram), and a network drive mounted on the desktop at work.

Close the computer, bring it home and the network drive still shows as mounted. If I touch anything in the finder (specifically that mounted 'ghost volume' to eject/trash it), I get the spinning pizza wheel of death. 5 Minutes later, I try to force quit the finder, and it doesn't work. Various other apps won't close, and eventually, I give up and cursing hit and hold the power button to hard restart the computer.

Happens about every second or third day.

Whats up with this? So much for 'protected memory' and a stable system. The only difference is your mouse doesn't freeze - but the result is the same, perhaps even more annoying, as the 'promise' of being able to get out of the pizza wheel loop is there, encouraging you to spend lots of time and frustration trying, rather than giving up and rebooting.

[Snowball]

Network drive mounting is a problem with the Finder, hopefully addressed with Panther. Basically all we can tell you is to remember to umount your network drives when they are still connected. Better yet, don't go to sleep with network drives mounted if you can help it. The Finder is what crashed, not the entire OS (otherwise it would be a pretty lame OS).

Remember, when you get the beachball, your computer is not crashed OS 9 style - if it is, you'd have a kernel panic which in Jaguar is a sign saying "You must restart the computer now". You can still ssh into your box and restart the Finder, or run anything else. Protected memory is certainly a good thing, because when the Finder crashes, it hasn't messed up any other programs memory.

[DeltaMac]

Yes, your system tries to unmount the network volume, but with no connection to the network, your system tries all possible means to access the network volume, which it cannot do. (But can take several minutes to 'not' do it, hence the beach ball) Simply remember to unmount your net volume while still connected to the network where it is used. You could also create different Network Locations for Home, and Work, which can make your user experience more enjoyable.
One of the apps created to run various maintenance scripts can make a big difference in your system perfomance. One example is OnyX, available through versiontracker.com.
Also, running the Repair Permissions, in Drive Utility/First Aid tab, can help many systems that seem unstable, back to more solid operation. Doesn't always help, but a useful thing to try.
search for 'OS X troubleshooting' here for much more info, especially about running FSCK, but these couple of items are a big start

[bossa nova]

I agree with Snowball and DeltaMac...unmount the drives before you leave. And definitly try one of the apps for maintenance. My favorite is Cocktail. You can find it also on versiontracker.com.

The most troubling thing I have seen at work with my clients is messed up permissions. You may find it helpful to run disk repair every once in a while to make sure that you Mac is running smoothly.

[Ripcord]

I just checked, the CIFS problem appears to be fixed in the latest Panther builds, although I don't at all like some of the other changes they've made, the browsing mode stinks, and it doesn't connect properly to systems by IP address.

[mr. k]

To fix this you can keyboard into another app (command-tab to access the dock, then find another application running, or even better, turn on full keyboard access and use control-F3) then from there go to apple menu and then force quit, select finder, and then hit relaunch - tada! The finder will restart and you won't have lost anything in any of your other apps.