The awful truth about OS X

R

redlinzus

Registered
My OS X crashes early and often... so much so that it is unusable...we're talking hard freeze and power button restart...

Now I have a strong sneaking suspicion that I have a nasty hardware problem somewhere in my machine because my 9.1 crashes 3-6 times a day as well and more under heavy use...despite constant and expert maintenance...

I want the hardware problem to be the cause and hope to be true...but

I am looking for confirmation from others.... How much is OS X crashing on you if at all? Am I in the minority (and I pray that I am)...

Looking for any advice....static electricity? Bad Feng Shui? I am open to anything....

I have tested all I can test and know to do...tech tool pro can't find any hardware problems...

All along i thought it was 9.1, but OS X crashed within 3 minutes of launching... and in fact the installer hard froze...

So me thinks I have a hardware issue...anyone?

My computer:
B&W 300 (upgraded ZIF to 450)
448 Megs Ram
14 Gig Quantum 7200 (not original drive)
ATI Rage 32mb PCI for second monitor
G3 Seriel Port adaptor for modem port
No SCSI


 
My MacOSX never crashes. my MacOS9 crashes anywhere from days to less than an hour, depending on what versions of which apps I am using. Some apps are rock solid, some are buggy.
 
Yeah, I think you're in the minority. I can't recall even my PB crashing, and the final release seems to be fairly solid, so far as I've seen so far. Not a single crash. What problems I do have come mostly from applications.
 
the other week I was backing up data from my drive when it crashed (ironic, i know) but the problem was -- it never came back. it turns out that the Motherboard fried.

we have another machine here (that was purchased at the same time) which is extremely flaky -- crashes all the live long day. we're thinking of sending it into the shop to see if it has the same potential problem. it doesn't have X on it, though.

If you are experiencing crashes in X then there is something really wrong as I've only 'crashed' once in over a week with it running... even then it didn't crash per se, it just stopped behaving properly so I rebooted to bring it back to square one.

question: did you install over the Public Beta? do you have a mix of RAM installed or a lot of non-apple RAM?

RAM has been an issue with a lot of folks, i hear, and one should never install over the PB...
 
there are a number of HW issues with this setup that could be causing crashes - the ZIF upgrade, the serial port adaptor, the nonstandard video card...
 
The only time that i have had X crash is when i am running classic. the first night X crashed about every 15 mins or so. When i didn't have Classic running, it was solid as a rock.

-dan
 
Crashes?
I doubt that any of these are really crashes in the pre OS X sense. It's not like in old times when any badly conceived junk of application code could kill off the OS. We're talking UNIX here. If your application dies and even pulls the GUI with it, it should be possible of connect from another machine (SSH for example), kill the offending processes and get the machine up to heat again without having to reboot. At least, this is simple enough under Linux in similar situations when xwindows croaks (which happens). I haven't actually tried to kill Aqua to see what happens, but I find it extremely unlikely that the kernel actually died in these supposed crashes.

Under OS 9 I suspected USB when my machine died. Those drives seemed flaky enough so that whenever a new scanner or whatever was installed, crash frequency increased. I suggest, redlinzus, that you try to get any available updates for such drivers, or carefully check if you're perhaps experiencing a RAM problem.

/stone
 
I want to thank everyone for their input...

After alot of research and patience, my crashing in both OS X and 9.1 are definitely hardware related. And actually OS X has been better at pointing it out in it's own way...

While the jury is still out...

I took a look at my RAM situation, I have all RAM slots full with for different manufacturers RAM. NOt a good idea I am learning...

What I didi tonight was remove all teh RAM and try them one by one...

I started with each upgraded RAM, each a 128 MEG RAM in the first RAM slot on my B&W G3....

I started up OS X with each of the 128 RAM's individually...

With any of the 3 installed individually... OS X crashed within 2-3 minutes... each time by IE 5 the usual suspect in both OS X and 9.1! Oddly enough crashing at the same time and point as it does in 9.1 (loading the Apple excite start page)

As I grew more and more bewildered, I began to believe that maybe I was dealing with a processor or motherboard problem, I put in the original 64meg DRAM that shipped orginally with my machine...

Lo and behold OS X started up and hasn't crashed yet. I am writing this on IE 5.1 on OS X on a measley 64 megs of RAM. OS X chugs slowly on this configuration, but hasn't crashed yet.

Maybe this is all premature, but I hope it's the 3rd party RAM...

But this leads me to another problem... what kind of new RAM do I buy? RAM at the Apple store is RIDICULOUSLY expensive... 256 MEG RAM is $400!!!

Suggestions for what and where to buy RAM are welcome...

I hope I am not too premature on my celebration on this RAM thing, but I am going to leave OS X up all night and see if I can crash this thing....

thanks again to all you out there...


 
I'm not sure how related this may be, but Apple just released a whole bunch of firmware updates, and the word out is that any third party RAM was rendered unusable after the firmware update was installed. I think I read somewhere that apple is trying to fix this problem, but who knows.

Hope this hlelps
 
Kingston RAM is pretty cheap and works fine for me (iBook 128 MB). However, to suggest a particular brand without actually knowing their overall quality may be unsafe. They do offer life time guarantee, though, so perhaps...

/stone
 
Most defenitely a RAM/HW/driver problem.
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I've been using heavily the MacOS X on a Cube (non Apple RAM) since its launch. Compiling Apache, MySQL, SSH, using Classic... Not a single OS crash , no GUI freeze yet (In PB I ssh in and kill all my apps, going back to the login window without restarting most of the times) and no kernel panics.
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Didn't create a second non-admin user for me though. If you can, create at least 2 users (one as the installer and one as the regular user) as most sites recommend.
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dani++
 
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