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truaxbiology · Oct 18, 2003, 09:05 PM

I'm a recent switcher and I have been bragging to all of my Windows friends about the stability of OS X as I have been using it daily since August and it hasn't skipped a beat; that is until yesterday. I have a 12" powerbook with 640 megs of RAM. I was using it as I normally do...email, Word, Sarfari, and Dreamweaver, when it started behaving very strangly. Most of the icons in the dock quit responding, and those that did, pointed to a finder window instead of launching the program. I restarted the computer thinking that would solve the problem. Wow, was I wrong. The computer refused to boot. All it would do is flash an icon that went from a mac-two face logo to a question mark. I put in my OS X disc and went to the disc utilities and tried to repair any problems; that didn't help. I then reinstalled the OS. That produced a boot, however, it didn't seem to correct all of the issues. I then formated the drive and started over. That seems to have fixed the problem (as I figured it would). My question is as follows: what happened? What recourse should I have taken? Can I expect this behavior from my Mac often? In nearly 10 years of running Windows as my main OS, I can only remember have to reformat the computer in order to sort out an OS issues a couple of times (Ok, maybe more than a couple). Should I stop bragging about the stability? Thanks for reading this dissertation

Respectfully,
Rob Truax

waffffffle · Oct 18, 2003, 10:17 PM

Be more specific about your problem. The problem was just with the dock and reinstalling OS X didn't fix it? Did creating a new user fix it? I bet there was probably a simple way of resolving the problem and a reformat wasn't necessary.

NeXTLoop · Oct 18, 2003, 10:18 PM

First off, let me assure you that is certainly NOT the norm. I've rarely heard of issues like that. Now, regarding the cause, there could be a couple of reasons.

You'll have to give us more information as to what you had done shortly before the problems started. What programs had you installed? What drivers had you installed? Had you installed any third-party RAM? Had you hooked up any third-party scanners or printers? Here's a big one.... had you installed any themes to change the appearance of the OS?

Again, problems like this are EXTREMELY rare. But there are a few things that can cause problems. Once we know more about your setup, we might be able to help you avoid this in the future.

truaxbiology · Oct 18, 2003, 11:11 PM

Thanks for the replies! I really appreciate this forum; it's made the "switch" enjoyable and interesting. Regarding my "crash", I did go a little tweak happy with themes, however, the problem seemed to show up long after I installed the themes. I had the Milk theme installed at the time. The most recent software that had been installed, and indeed seemed to correlate with the "crash" was iBlog (the computer was fine for two days after the install) and WS FTP. WS FTP was installed hours before the crash. WS FTP didn't seem to do much as it installed, however. Can anyone explain the flashing icon at start up? It's like the startup disk couldn't be found. I can't really be more specific as to the symptoms of the crash as I just observed "odd" computer behavior and decided a reboot was in order (this was a common solution with WinXP). It was when I couldn't reboot that I really started paying attention

I will be more observant from now on. I did have a recent backup of my home directory

Thanks again.
Respectfully,
Rob Truax

Gul Banana · Oct 18, 2003, 11:30 PM

Don't rule out hardware problems, especially in a laptop. Is it possible that the machine took some kind of bump, which slightly damaged some sort of internal component? What you're experiencing doesn't sound entirely like software issues.

businezguy · Oct 19, 2003, 12:03 AM

I've had my iBook for about six months now. I just had my first kernel panic ever in OS X the other day on it. I have no idea what caused it. It booted fine though. I was using the DVD and transferring files at the same time.

My dual G4 has never ever crashed. So basically that makes 1.5 years and only one crash that only needed a reboot. Not too bad, if I do say so myself!

DaGuy · Oct 19, 2003, 12:37 AM

A crash on MacOSX manifests itself, typically as a kernel panic and it reboots just fine. I know this from earlier versions of the OS. Jaguar has NEVER crashed on me.

There was one occassion were I thought it crashed because the icons were kinda screwed up and the system was not responding with its usual snapiness... I just logged out (not a reboot) and things went back to normal. And yes, I was also messing with themes... Nevermore, after that. It wasn't worth it.

mchladek · Oct 19, 2003, 01:17 AM

Originally posted by DaGuy:
And yes, I was also messing with themes... Nevermore, after that. It wasn't worth it.

This has been my experience too. I've been using OS X since the public beta and have only experienced two kernel panics both of which were under 10.1. The first happened a couple hours after installing the OS. (I still don't understand that one. I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary.) The second was after I was playing around a lot with themes. Like DaGuy, I noticed a slugishness and little quirks. I had to reboot which didn't work and ended up reinstalling the OS which finally fixed it. As for Jaguar, it's only been out of its box once: when I installed it a year ago. I haven't had a single quirk with it. I would say it was something to do with the themes.