"It Never Crashes" it does...

Lt Major Burns

Lt Major Burns

"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
it seems to me that the super-stable intuitive, never-go-wrong, much advertised never-crashing just-works Mac OS X... isn't.

http://www.apple.com/uk/switch/whyswitch/

there's all the problems on windows with the .dlls, but then we get rogue .plist files that need to be trashed, and they are impossible to find, if you don't know where you are looking

there's also permissions. does this actually do anything? i've never seen any diffrence before or after a permissions repair.

Are you just a tad too well acquainted with the notorious “blue screen of death”?
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kernal panics? a nicely greyed -out, translucent screen of death.

i know nothings perfect, especially with technology, but i think apple could be a little bit more honest. "it hardly ever crashes", as opposed to "it never crashes" etc...
 
Well any blanket statement about anything should be taken with a grain of salt. But i have to say my PowerBook never once crashed in 2 years of having it, while in the same time period my parent's PC has crashed 2 times that i can remember -- not a big deal, but i use my powerbook seemingly 24/7 and my parents use the PC every couple of days to check their email for 5 minutes.

However, with my parent's PC, with only 6-8 apps open, you begin to see the horrible multitasking abilities of Windows. I constantly have 10 apps open on my PowerBook and while both machines have the same amount of ram (although the PC has pc2700 and my powerbook only has PC 133) i never see a slow down

From what i've seen in your other posts, i don't think it's too far off to think there is a hardware problem with your computer. What do the Apple specialists have to say about your problems?
 
my mac works fine, now... i did have problems around the tiger upgrade, but it seems to have subsided, and i never had it crash, it was minor instability.

i posted this objectively, not as a personal bitch, but because i've seen a general increase in the trend for posts about trashing plists, kernal panics and automatic diagnosing of a permissions problem. has it always been like this? i'm not sure. i suppose it was just a late night gripe.... :(
 
Lt Major Burns said:
my mac works fine, now... i did have problems around the tiger upgrade, but it seems to have subsided, and i never had it crash, it was minor instability.

i posted this objectively, not as a personal bitch, but because i've seen a general increase in the trend for posts about trashing plists, kernal panics and automatic diagnosing of a permissions problem. has it always been like this? i'm not sure. i suppose it was just a late night gripe.... :(
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No one said OS X never crashes. The person who thinks that needs his/her head examined.

Computers are the most complex home tool in most houses today! That is safe to say. I don't know where computer users got the idea that a computer should never be problem free. Strike that, I do know. It was years of marketing! My advise to you, don't believe the hype.
 
Satcomer said:
No one said OS X never crashes. The person who thinks that needs his/her head examined.
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apple did, on the switch page. i regret posting this thread. can we close it now? i was in a bad mood :mad: but i'm better now :D. i just had a stupid argument with a windows user about the mac/pc debate (started by my first switcher, a girl) after this, and i realised all is well when it is a lot more stable than their boxes. i can run 10 apps and it'll be fine. i don't have to live behind a firewall, and run anti-spy/ad/malware programs weekly, or defrag the HDDs or clean the registry etc.... like anything designed by humans though, human error will surface, in this case, in coding errors, which equate to bugs. and my mac has far fewer of these than xp. not none, but fewer.

sorry for this stupid thread
 
You can lock the thread yourself as you are the one that started it. Look for the little lock thingy.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
apple did, on the switch page. i regret posting this thread. can we close it now? i was in a bad mood :mad: but i'm better now :D. i just had a stupid argument with a windows user about the mac/pc debate (started by my first switcher, a girl) after this, and i realised all is well when it is a lot more stable than their boxes. i can run 10 apps and it'll be fine. i don't have to live behind a firewall, and run anti-spy/ad/malware programs weekly, or defrag the HDDs or clean the registry etc.... like anything designed by humans though, human error will surface, in this case, in coding errors, which equate to bugs. and my mac has far fewer of these than xp. not none, but fewer.
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I run Firefox on my Windows PC and I don't have problems with spyware / adware etc. It also depends on the kind of sites that you visit. A lot of viruses nowadays are sent via email so if you use prudent email practice, you should be fine.

With that said though, XP is seriously out of date. It was released in 2001 like OS X but has only had two service packs - both of which were designed to fix bugs and security flaws that shouldn't have been in the OS in the first place. And OS X has advanced a fair deal in that time in comparison.

I tend to hibernate my machine (so technically it's running without restarts) but every few weeks I get a BSOD and have to restart it. It doesn't seem to be comfortable with being on for long periods of time despite the fact that I have enough fans to drown out a jet engine.
 
I've managed to crash my PB twice by simply plugging in my USB 2 memory stick. That simple. Just plug it in and the translucent screen of death comes up.
 
Satcomer said:
Computers are the most complex home tool in most houses today! That is safe to say. I don't know where computer users got the idea that a computer should never be problem free.
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I think this statement's a sad reflection on how the computer industry managed to hoodwink the average consumer.

If consumers had demanded quality (i.e. took back their computers, or at least refused to get new ones) when they crashed, the industry would be forced to churn out stuff slower (i.e. actually have more quality control) and stop using consumers as crash test dummies.

Microsoft should have stopped existing before the term "Blue screen of death" became a commonly understood (and accepted) expression.

Kap

P.S. Funny sidenote: The browser on the linux box I'm on actually crashed as I submitted this post. :rolleyes: :D
 
Cars never break down, TVs never fail, VCRs never chew up tapes, toasters never toast unevenly..etc....

Considering WHAT computers to and the complexity, I'd say its much more reliable than any of the stuff above.

Incidently, my G3 has kernel panics more often than my XP box has blue screens. I've had 3 kernel panics in 1 year and I've had zero bluescreens in 6 months on my new PC. Bluescreens by the way are mostly caused by bad drivers and nothing else. I'd have control over those drivers. Kernel panics might be caused by drivers as well but I have no control of those, OSX is shipped with what I need so if it crashes for some reason, I'm pretty much screwed until apple fixes it. Not so great.

The sad thing is that I use my PC now for 99% of things and the G3 for 1% but even with that kind of ratio, I'm getting less blue screens vs kernel panics. Not trying to be biased but I do have both and this is my experience so far. XP and Win2k are far more stable than anyone gives credit.
 
I think it's a matter of how well you know to configure a system and use the proper "etiquette" for managing your computer, be it a Mac or PC running whatever. And yes, the only times I've had crashes on Windows (XP and 2000) have been because of drivers. For the most part, my systems (Mac/Win/Linux) have been pretty stable and run for a good while.

But it's this "etiquette" that not everyone has when it comes to computer maintenance, as we see moreso in the Windows world with users' lack of updating their systems. Sure, most of that is automated, but it's only helpful if you have an "always on" connection. Dial-up users either have to have their computers dial overnight or they have to update manually when they are connected, while hoping they don't get disconnected.

I see the fault lying on both parties. One for users not being proactive about learning or keeping their computer in top form, and another for the corps not making all of this easy for the end user. If people didn't take preventative maintenance on their cars and the companies didn't make these cars safe to begin with, imagine what hell it would be to cross the street!

I hope this is making sense, especially since I'm typing this with one eye open at 12:11 AM... ::sleepy::
 
I think what you said does make a lot of sense. In my own case, maybe because windows is my primary OS, I like it more and put more attention and effort into system maintenance compared to my G3 so maybe thats why its more stable and vice versa. Guess if you love it, it will love you back :) LOL
 
I've had my W2k PC for 4 years and that is exactly how many crashes it has had. None of them requiring anything more serious than a restart. I have lost count of how many forced reinstalls I have had to do with my Mac and all the flavors of OSX.

Each time I have lost yet another lot of files, settings, data.

Just got back up and running after yet another what I call blue screen of death in Panther. I get through all the login only to end up with a blue screen with nothing but a live cursor on it.

"Safe Boot" didn't work, Disk First Aid as always wwas useless, and I had all sorts of hastles trying to reinstall Panther. I finally gave up after working on it over a day, and upgraded to Tiger. I just hope Tiger doesn't go flakey on me because it was not a clean reinstall, just an upgrade on top of what was left of the Panther install.

The big trouble with Apple's, less than perfect, Unix is that if you don't work on the same install that gave you trouble you don't get back your User stuff.

I'd love to have a reliable rescue CD, even DiskWarrior as good as it is, is painfully slow and doesn't do everything I need.
 
OS/X itself might not crash, but applications running under it surely will. Since I switched in November '04 I've must have "Submitted A Report" to Apple at least 100 to 200 times.

XP tends to crash more often than OS/X, however, OS/X applications tend to crash way more often than XP apps.
 
My iMac kept crashing until I realised I should't be repairing permissions. It stopped crashing. Then when I installed Panther it started crashing, and it kept doing it for a few months almost everyday. I changed the RAM last summer (the problem was not Panther) and it didn't crash once since August 2004, and I use it everyday.

So basically, if you use commercial apps, if your computer is in good hardware condition, if you do regular maintenance, and if you don't play in OS X where you shouldn't be messing around, you are a lot less likely to get a crash.
 
Canada-Man said:
So basically, if you use commercial apps, if your computer is in good hardware condition, if you do regular maintenance, and if you don't play in OS X where you shouldn't be messing around, you are a lot less likely to get a crash.
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Exactly, you seem to have summed it up nicely. I couldn't say it better.

On the lighter side, if you leave the mac switched off - it won't crash at all. ::ha::
 
aicul said:
On the lighter side, if you leave the mac switched off - it won't crash at all. ::ha::
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Odd... I've found that if I leave my Mac switched on it won't ever crash.

My last three uptimes... 93 days, 231 days, 133 days. No crashes (kernel panics) in the last 457 days (actually no crashes on this system since I installed Mac OS X on it on September 19, 2002).
 
My powermac G5 started to crash fairly often a while back, it was around the time that I decided to put a proper backup system in place so I saved the important stuff and reinstalled panther and subsequent updates. I agree with nixgeek, if you install everything you come across and don't maintain the system properly you will have problems. At the moment I have Logic, iLife apps, Office v.x, Firefox (irish language version), photoshop 7, toast 6 ti and chronosync and HP scanjet softeare installed. Unless I need something I refuse to install it. This was about three months ago and the system has not crashed once. Even the apps are far more stable.
 
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