OMG just how bad does Tiger have to get before we give up on it?

octavedoctor

octavedoctor

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It seems to me that Apple have completely lost their way with OSX.

I now have less issues with Windows than I do with OSX.

Here is a cross section of some of the problems after 10.4.5...

A bug means that i can't set my desktop icons' font to less than 11pt without the icon column distribution doubling in width

Every time i start up my Mighty Mouse preference pane is replaced with a generic one and to get it working I have to unplug the mouse and plug it back in.

Flash drives can't be ejected or unmounted once a file has been opened; the message "The volume {name} cannot be ejected because it is in use. Please try quitting applications and try again." This happens even when no applications are running.

My Wacom tablet no longer works even though I have installed the latest driver. Wacom are unable to suggest a solution.

My Lexmark printer utility no longer works. Lexmark are unable to provide a working driver.

It's no wonder we are the laughing stock of the Windows world. It wouldn't be so bad if Apple's smug team of prima donnas didn't make submitting feedback and bug reports such an obstacle course...
 
For the Lexmark and Wacom issues, it sounds like a vendor problem rather than an Apple problem, but I do understand your concerns. We have to make-do with sub-par 3rd party drivers, and some parts of the operating system just don't seem "finished" yet or don't quite work right (although there isn't an operating system in the world that doesn't have this problem).

Apple has a VERY easy to navigate feedback page -- I don't know why you think it's an obstacle course:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

As for the flash drive problems, are they formatted as HFS+, or are they formatted as FAT32? Typcally, FAT32 is a "Windows" format, and will not perform as well as HFS+.
 
It's the HFS+ ones i'm having the trouble with.

I have two MSDOS formatted flash drives and they aren't affected.

You're right that no OS is really finished, but people do seem to have trivial problems with OSX that we shouldn't really be having. Tiger is now the 3rd incarnation of OSX; they can be forgiven for the earliest version being "unfinished" but upgrades are supposed to change things for the better and not worse.

My guess is that the rubbish Spotlight feature is what is causing the problem. This is something i can well do without but it's so tightly integrated i can't uninstall it.

It's the problems with the mighty mouse that are the most absurd; if this was a third party driver i could understand there being problems but this is Apples own software we are talking about and it was only released a few months ago! How ridiculous is it that within such a short space of time they should release an "upgrade" that causes incompatibility with their own hardware? I have searched all Apple's archives to see if there is a driver update available but there's nothing. You can't even download the software if you lose your disc!

Yes you are correct that Apple's feedback website is easy to navigate, once you know where it is. Before that you have to spend some time searching for it though. Even when you do leave feedback you get no acknoweledgement and the rate at which Apple resonds to issues raised suggest they aren't taking much notice.

I recall when I ran Panther all my Windows using friends were able to burn CDs with an 800 mb capacity while OSX wouldn't recognise a CD with a capacity larger than 650Mb. This wasn't addressed at all to the best of my knowledge. The same thing is happening with the Mighty Mouse issue.

Another friend has just got rid of his G5 as it is unable to do most of the things he does with ease on his PC, such as editing Mpeg-2 files without demuxing. Formerly enthusiastic about the Mac, he know just regards it as an expensive toy for internet access rather than a serious machine...

There really is NO excuse for Apple's neglect of these issues of basic interface functionality: at this stage i expect OSX to be a bit more polished than it's predecessor, not less so.
 
Strange that the HFS+ ones do it... I'm at a loss, but I have had a disk refuse to eject before claiming files were open when no applications were running.

I'm not trying to be nit-picky, but 800MB on a CD is outside of the CD-R specification. It's just like "icing on the cake" that you can "overburn" a CD and squeeze 700 or 800MB onto it, but the CD specification is that 650MB is the limit. There is at least one application that can "overburn" on a Mac... if overburning is still important, it may help to check it out:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19058

I still think Apple's feedback page is relatively simple to find. It's the 4th link down (under a bunch of other feedback pages, like for .mac and iTunes) when you do a search from Apple's main page for "feedback." Also, Apple never responds to feedback nor bug reports, unless they need to get more information about a particular setup or configuration. Feedback is feedback, and is not meant for a reply. Apple also never publicizes bugs in their system until a fix is ready -- not even a confirmation, which, I think, is understandable. Instead of them working on a fix and saying, "We're working on a fix," they simply work on a fix and announce it when it's ready -- either way, they're working on a fix. Besides, not everyone has those problems -- if a large number of people report about one specific problem, then Apple does take notice and remedies the situation. If only a handful of people report a problem, then it would be logical to think that perhaps the problem is a consequence of the user and not a system-wide fault of OS X. Apple's working on fixes in a prioritized order, and it sucks when your issue isn't at the top of the list, so I don't know what to say...

At any rate, I think it would make us happier here if we could maybe take a stab at your issues, one at a time. It may be that something's just gone a little awry with your installation or system, and it could be an easy fix for some things. I'm sure we'd all hate to see someone become dissatisfied with the Mac platform, so if you're willing to give it a go, let's tackle the issues one by one so your computer doesn't end up like your friend's.
 
Sounds like your computer's a rare case of "woops!". I'd backup and clean install and carefully re-setup. It's certainly not how 10.4.5 works for me, my colleagues and our clients. So... I have to resent phrases like "OMG how bad has Tiger..." etc. While I'm not completely pro Tiger (there are a _lot_ of things I think they should have left to the choice of the user/admin, for example...) and in many cases prefer Panther, I have to say that our systems have been stable since 10.4.2, whereas Panther was a _really_ horrific story, the system being finally stable at 10.3.4 and then unstable/bug-ridden 'til 10.3.8 and _again_ unstable/bug-ridden with 10.3.9. Tiger certainly looks much better to me in that regard. Saying it's worse than Windows is pure flame-bait. And we don't need trolling around here. See board-rules for reference.
 
Certainly, Tiger has some bugs. As with any Mac OS, my is stable as a brick house. True, I don't have much third-party items installed or in use. Any release of a new OS needs time to mature. We all agree, the Finder needs some work, and hopefully, Leopard will address those issues.

As Fryke stated, perhaps a reinstall is what you should prepare yourself for. My PB was a bit flaky when I purchased it, with the factory installed Tiger. Before I got settled into it, I did my own fresh install, been cruising smoothly ever since.
 
It's a fresh install followed by a straight upgrade to the 10.4.5 combo update.

I am a Mac evangelist and have used nothing else since system 8 so accusing me of being a troll is neither constructive nor accurate, neither is reference to justifiable criticism of what i feel is a badly implemented series of changes to an otherwise stable interface as being flame-bait. On a forum such as this we should be able to freely discuss and criticise both Apple and OSX or are we just a collection of mindless label-junkies who will buy anything with an Apple brand regardless of whether it's any good or not?

The fact is that the calls here for a "fresh re-install" echo the mantra of the Microsoft support people when things go flaky with Windows; if this doesn't tell you how bad it's got then nothing can...

In case you missed it, my problem isn't with third party software at all; apart from the Wacom and Lexmark drivers all my third party software is working fine. A new printer has solved the Lexmark problem...

The main problem is 10.4.5's incompatibility with Apple's own Mighty Mouse.

I can well understand that many of the improvements brought by Tiger are important and valuable. God forbid that some ruthless chinese hacker should gain access to my important collection of guitar circuit diagrams or my archive of nude celebrities through some obscure QuickTime exploit!

However what is far more important to me is that my computer's human interface should work properly and it doesn't. I shouldn't have to unplug my mouse and plug it back in every time I switch on: that's stupid, it's the sort of thing i expect from a PC and not a Mac...

Incidentally, I have a large collection of CDs here clearly labelled 700mb and some labelled 850mb. OSX now recognises these capacities but it's only recently it has been able to, while XP was able to recognise and burn to those capacities at least two years ago. Why'd it take Apple so long to catch up?

I appreciate the concern of all of you; my dissatisfaction with Tiger and Apple notwithstanding i am not about to turn my back on the Mac but i will hold to my criticism that Apple as a company are smug, secretive and slow to respond to the stated requirements of their user base preferring instead to foist upon us the changes that they feel we should be having rather than the ones we clearly want. This is why i believe Tiger is a mess and i have no confidence that "Leopard" will be any better...
 
I was far more frustrated with all the goofy problems, general clunkiness and ugliness of Windows 3.1 - XP than I am with OS X bugs. Far more.

This all falls into the realm of opinion.

It's too bad you're having these problems. Are you asking us to help or trying to convince us that OS X stinks?

We'll be glad to help, but it's going to be a very, very tough (well, impossible) sell to convince us it's a good idea to trade OS X for a Microsoft OS. You or anyone who wants to go WinXP is welcome to it.

I don't miss the search doggie, the pop-up balloons, activation, Luna, any of that ugly sh*t.

Doug

P.S. I can't believe XP doesn't journal its filesystems or support EFI. What kind of OS can't support EFI and journaling? ;)
 
The reason that I, for one, am still sticking with Panther(OS 10.3.9) is the plethora of glitches Tiger users have been and still are reporting with 10.4+. I realize that some Tiger users are reporting few, if any, problems but I'm still coming across a goodly amount of negative reports.
OS 10.3.9, for me, has been smooth, stable and virtually problem free. And I have not found Tiger to be any faster than Panther. Neither do I need or want the obligatory new and often gimmicky "bells and whistles" that every new OS comes replete with.
Since there's more and more software that requires 10.4+ as a minimum, I reckon that I'll have to move up to Tiger (or Leopard?) somewhere down the line, but for the foreseeable future, 10.3.9 is just fine with me.
 
Count me as another who is sticking with Panther. While I have the software, I refuse to move my iMac up to Tiger.

My iBook runs Tiger. And while I keep trying to like it, I just can't.
 
dktrickey said:
It's too bad you're having these problems. Are you asking us to help or trying to convince us that OS X stinks?
Click to expand...

As if!

Your missing my point...

I love OSX, but i seriously think that Tiger is the worst incarnation of it yet in terms of interface usability. Yes, there have been improvements, security enhancements, and stability enhancements mostly in areas invisible to the normal home user but what matters to me is that my mouse should work when i switch it on and that i should be able to eject my flash disks without powering the computer down.

Windows makes me want to scratch my eyes out, is irritating and annoying with it's constant pop ups, balloons, tooltips, antivirus updates... well, you know only too well what i'm talking about but the mouse works, and the menus don't stall because the "open with" item is overloaded with every imaginable photoshop action and multiple links to every application on all my cloned disks and if i want to eject a flash drive it does so; admittedly making me jump through a few hoops first.

Am i expecting too much that my iMac should operate just as smoothly?

I have four Macs, this iMac running Tiger, an iBook running Panther 10.3.9 a 400mHz iMac running a cloned version of the OS on the iBook and a 233 iMac running Panther; amazingly quickly, I might add...

So don't paint me as someone trying to dis the Mac, but i am not about to pretend that everything in the Apple orchard is lovely because it's not.

My problem is with Tiger; nothing else. Automator is pointless, Spotlight has limited functionality (it was unable to find a file I'd planted on my hard drive even after a restart although it found plenty of completely irrelevant results) and Dashboard... well, Dashboard's weather widget would only return results from Cardiff, Alabama not Cardiff, UK. The advice from Weather.com was that i should search for Paris, Europe *sighs* and then navigate to "Cardiff' via a drop down menu of European locations but it still only returned results from Alabama...

And why does it have to be housed in an Expose style gimmick? Konfabulator (now Yahoo widget engine) sits widgets on my desktop where i can check them without any additional button pressing.

OK, call me idle, but if I'd wanted to work at it i wouldn't have bought Macs.

If we could have had the security and speed improvements (OK, Safari is faster) but without all the gimmicky bells and whistles, maybe a Finder that allows you to configure menus, like KDE Linux with a safe "Move" command in place of a greyed out "Cut" and contextual menus that don't take 5 minute of spining beachball to appear we would have an operating system worth using...

I make no apologies for restating this but how ridiculous is it that Apple should release an OS update that conflicts with it's own recently released peripheral hardware!
 
octavedoctor said:
well, Dashboard's weather widget would only return results from Cardiff, Alabama not Cardiff, UK. The advice from Weather.com was that i should search for Paris, Europe *sighs* and then navigate to "Cardiff' via a drop down menu of European locations but it still only returned results from Alabama...
Click to expand...

I am in the US, and get these results through the Weather widget after entering Cardiff
Cardiff, AL
Cardiff by the Sea, CA
Cardiff, Australia
Cardiff, United Kingdom(Wales)
Cardiff, New Zealand
Cardiff, Trinidad and Tobago
Oh, also Cardiff Hall, Jamaica

I hate to fall back on an old Windows stand-by, but sometimes - with a system with lots of minor things going on, and major system upgrades under its belt, you can see a system approach what you expect after a backup, erase, and re-install.
Many user don't experience the types of problems that you talk about, although I am also sympathetic to complaints about extra 'fluff' that Tiger has added.
Opinions (using OS X since public beta version)
Tiger both boots and shuts down much faster than Panther, and many disk operations, and Finder functions are speedier.
Disk Utility, which I use a lot for troubleshooting a variety of Macs, in Tiger is MUCH improved, and you actually have a chance to repair some hard drive directories that required another 3rd party repair utility in the past.
Is all perfect? (Not, but just refer back to Windows for a comparison)
OS X does some things differently than Windows, and some of this discussion is all about personal preferences....
 
DeltaMac said:
Tiger both boots and shuts down much faster than Panther, and many disk operations, and Finder functions are speedier.
Disk Utility, which I use a lot for troubleshooting a variety of Macs, in Tiger is MUCH improved, and you actually have a chance to repair some hard drive directories that required another 3rd party repair utility in the past.
Click to expand...

Absolutely, this is the good stuff, and the reason i am persevering with it, but may i ask if you have tried using the Mighty Mouse with it?

I think we should stop comparing it to Windows, I drew that comparison because i don't see why I should put up with this kind of irritating interface bug when my Windows using friends don't have these problems, we are now on the fifth update to Tiger and this problem has persisted through the last three updates, but it doesn't help to imply that i'm suggesting that Windows is a credible alternative.

I want OSX to get better, not worse and it seems to me that every step forward in one area is at the expense of functionality that i've got used to. I didn't have any of the problems untill the 10.4.3 update which was the first one to trash my mouse software. The knock on effect was to make my computer unuseable requiring a fresh install. Apple was notified and I ignored the next update, then tried 10.4.5 in the hope that Apple might have fixed the bug but none of the reported bugs had been addressed except I found that after upgrading to 10.4.5 and reinstalling the Mighty Mouse software I could get it working again by unplugging it and plugging it back in. The problem is i now have to do this every time I start up!

I have tried plugging it into a USB port in the back of the machine but the cord is too short to reach so i have to use a keyboard port...
 
octavedoctor said:
Absolutely, this is the good stuff, and the reason i am persevering with it, but may i ask if you have tried using the Mighty Mouse with it?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I don't use the Mighty Mouse drivers on my personal Mac, I use the Mighty Mouse with USB Overdrive (I like the optional setup with Overdrive). But I use the Mighty Mouse (native drivers) exclusively at work, with 10.4.5, and no problems at all with the Mighty Mouse.

There is no need to ever install any software for the Mighty Mouse, unless your OSX is older than 10.4.3 - the drivers are native to the system since 10.4.3

Have you tried reloading the 10.4.5 combined updater?

I have abut 6 different flash drives from 64MB to 2GB, and don't have problems ejecting any - but I always initialize as a MacOS Extended volume. I have no need to use any with Windows.
 
I too have no issues with ejecting flashdrives plus I do use Apples mighty-mouse, again without problems.
The fact that you are having problems with your mouse and your flashdrives, both which are USB connected makes me wonder if your problem might be more USB related rather then Operating system version related.
Maybe bad USB hardware or corrupted USB drivers.
 
DeltaMac said:
There is no need to ever install any software for the Mighty Mouse, unless your OSX is older than 10.4.3 - the drivers are native to the system since 10.4.3
Click to expand...

I installed the software when i was running 10.4.2; this version of Tiger was fine. when I upgraded to 10.4.3 my Mighty Mouse preference pane was replaced with a generic mouse pane the only options for which were to choose left or right buttons as the primary button. Attempting to activate the right button led to the mouse being completely disabled so that i couldn't select anything and could only get contextual menus; I basically couldn't do anything, not even shut down. So I ....
DeltaMac said:
Have you tried reloading the 10.4.5 combined updater?
Click to expand...
...elected to wipe my internal drive, restore from a backup and try again.

Everything fine until 10.4.3 when the same thing happened. Thinking that perhaps the problem was some of my third party apps, haxies etc. conflicting with Tiger I then chose, as an experiment to wipe my drive, reinstall first OSX from my original 10.0.0 disk then follow the upgrade path OSX 10.0.0 > Panther > Tiger > Tiger 10.4.3 combo update.

Same thing, with the addition of lots of lost applications because I no longer have the installers or serial codes, this because the restoration process following the 10.4.3 upgrade resulted in the loss of all e-mails which arrived between the last time I used 10.3.9 and the 10.4.3 upgrade.

The system I am now running is restored from a 10.3.9 backup using Tiger>10.4.5 combo. I have had to alter the point size of my desktop icons to maintain the right side bias of the icon distribution but I can live with that. The problem with the flash drive is imponderable; activity monitor reveals nothing of any use, Finder still reports that the drive is in use even after all applications are closed, and the only thing that is left running is the window server a "kernel task" and my PGP engine and You control desktops engine, both of which have been updated to the latest version. I've tried disabling both and it has no effect on the problem.

Ockham's razor says that when multiple solutions present themselves you should select the simplest. As the only change that links these problems is the changes introduced with the 10.4.3 update I have to conclude that it is the source of the problem.

I thought Tiger was a disappointment from the moment I installed it with it's cheap gimmicks instead of the genuine improvements to the Finder i had long hoped for, considerably less VFM than Panther which offered an amazing boost in speed and usability over Jaguar, however it was usable and now I'm sort of stuck with it as i've become reliant on some apps which only run in Tiger, but I suspect that the problem is that Apple don't do much testing of their upgrades on older hardware; my iMac is three years old now and I'm guessing that many of you here who are trying hard to help are running more modern machines. Perhaps it is even an iMac specific problem.

I suppose that the biggest problems i have are my dented Mac user's ego; having endured the jibes of my Mac-phobic friends and colleagues supported by the knowledge that my machines work flawlessly day after day without any of the problems that we experience with Windows boxes to suddenly find myself experiencing the kind of trivial issues that we don't have with the PCs ...:eek:
 
My Mighty mouse driver works fine, and this is the first i've heard anything faulty with it. perhaps, therefore you have a faulty mighty mouse.
 
About the Lexmark problem.

I had an issue with my Lexmark X73 that was taking significant CPU time, and I found it was related to the monitor part of the Lexmark software. I disabled it (see my other post about that issue) and now MacOS behaves ok again, the my X73 cannot be used as a push-button copier anymore.
 
octavedoctor said:
Everything fine until 10.4.3 when the same thing happened. Thinking that perhaps the problem was some of my third party apps, haxies etc. conflicting with Tiger I then chose, as an experiment to wipe my drive, reinstall first OSX from my original 10.0.0 disk then follow the upgrade path OSX 10.0.0 > Panther > Tiger > Tiger 10.4.3 combo update.
...(Occam's) razor says that when multiple solutions present themselves you should select the simplest. As the only change that links these problems is the changes introduced with the 10.4.3 update I have to conclude that it is the source of the problem.

... my iMac is three years old now and I'm guessing that many of you here who are trying hard to help are running more modern machines. Perhaps it is even an iMac specific problem.

I suppose that the biggest problems i have are my dented Mac user's ego; having endured the jibes of my Mac-phobic friends and colleagues supported by the knowledge that my machines work flawlessly day after day without any of the problems that we experience with Windows boxes to suddenly find myself experiencing the kind of trivial issues that we don't have with the PCs ...:eek:
Click to expand...

I hear your frustration -
1. You don't need to go through some involved upgrade process (10.0-10.1-10.2, etc.) to install Tiger after erasing your drive, just install Tiger. I prefer to simplify, rather than add complications to the whole install process, if it is possible. If you wish to follow Occam, then keep the solution simple. Erase, install Tiger, upgrade to 10.4.5 - and don't install the Mighty Mouse software, the upgrade will include that for you.

2. My iMac is now nearly 6 years old. I use the Mighty Mouse, and have 10.4.5, and do not experience some of the problems that you report. My video is slowly dying, but is purely a hardware issue. I don't have real suggestions for you, but you do not have some specific problems only shared by iMacs.

3. The Mighty Mouse options will not show up if: You don't have a Mighty Mouse connected, or your Mighty Mouse is defective, or you have a USB hub that is not behaving properly (seems quite common to report)
 
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. To bring this discussion back to your problem, which is why you posted to begin with. As people have posted, they too have the Mighty Mouse, with varies configurations on different hard ware. They are not experiencing any trouble. It appears the problem is isolated to your computer and situation. Try some of the solutions people have offered. Unless a hardware issue is present, we all can get your system working fine.
 
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