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Andrew Stephens · Mar 2, 2005, 04:42 PM

I have been busy trying to help my colleague upgrade from a G4 Tower to a new PB. Sheer Hell. Every little tiny thing has been a nightmare. Right out of the box performance was very slow, windows and folders took ages to display and the beachball never went away. Copying files over the network was appallingly slow, airport reception was shot away and airport performance non existant, plus it shuts down completely half the time. He has 1 Gb of RAm is there still an issue with this?

It took ages to copy his work over as the machine wouldn't recognise the files etc on his ext HDD.

E-mail is awful, network failures all over the place. Actual networking still wont stay locked down and no-one can see his mac on the network at all.

At least half the application installs failed for all sorts of reasons. Fonts are a nightmare and fail to display in Quark via Suitcase. Fonts on web sites in Safari are all over the place, never the same font twice.

All in all I am coming to the view that the factory install was screwed and I should start again from scratch.

All in all NOT a good advert for OSX.

OptimusG4 · Mar 2, 2005, 04:51 PM

It is possible the factory image is corrupt. There is no way OS X out of the box should act like that. Sadly, I've been getting new machines and wiping the drive and installing OS X fresh without even setting it up first. This way it has the default OS on there and none of the additional software that is on there. Sorry to hear about the bad news

cpac · Mar 2, 2005, 05:30 PM

Originally posted by Andrew Stephens:
All in all NOT a good advert for OSX.

Agreed, but not at all typical either.

I'd go with the clean install also. I might also check the extra RAM if it wasn't Apple-installed - it's possible you have a bad stick in there, which could cause all sorts of weird problems.

Detrius · Mar 2, 2005, 08:43 PM

Originally posted by cpac:
...I might also check the extra RAM if it wasn't Apple-installed - it's possible you have a bad stick in there, which could cause all sorts of weird problems.

This comes HIGHLY recommended before even spending time on a reinstall. Run the Apple Hardware Test that came with the machine.

Anubis IV · Mar 2, 2005, 10:03 PM

How did you copy the files over anyway? One at a time? Replace just the apps but not the preferences and such? I mean, I'm not a big proponent of the whole repair permissions thing, but if you have a new computer and didn't set it up with the same username, couldn't you run into some problems?

Also, the easiest way I've seen to copy stuff from one computer to another is to hook them up with a Firewire cable during the Mac OSX install. If possible, it'll basically copy the entire old computer's contents to the new computer and set everything up for you. Dunnof what computers that works with though, but I thought I'd throw it out there as an option.

NeilCharter · Mar 2, 2005, 11:46 PM

Did the new powerbook work properly b4 the files were transferred?

If you got a bum machine - take it back to Apple. It's under warranty and let them waste their time fixing it. Not you.

Big Mac · Mar 3, 2005, 06:29 AM

Originally posted by Anubis IV:
How did you copy the files over anyway? One at a time? Replace just the apps but not the preferences and such? I mean, I'm not a big proponent of the whole repair permissions thing, but if you have a new computer and didn't set it up with the same username, couldn't you run into some problems?

Also, the easiest way I've seen to copy stuff from one computer to another is to hook them up with a Firewire cable during the Mac OSX install. If possible, it'll basically copy the entire old computer's contents to the new computer and set everything up for you. Dunnof what computers that works with though, but I thought I'd throw it out there as an option.

Repairing permissions only works for applications installed by Installer. The ownership of files will be screwed up if files are transfered manually and the usernames are different. The new transfer agent of the Setup Assistant should definitely be used to upgrade from a previous Mac. It comes with all recent Macs.

Anubis IV · Mar 4, 2005, 01:12 AM

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Repairing permissions only works for applications installed by Installer. The ownership of files will be screwed up if files are transfered manually and the usernames are different. The new transfer agent of the Setup Assistant should definitely be used to upgrade from a previous Mac. It comes with all recent Macs.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that they should try repairing permissions, just that I thought this might be a case where permissions were the actual cause of the problem. And since so many people tend to look at permissions as the root of all evil on Macs, I tried to distance myself from that crowd...

Andrew Stephens · Mar 5, 2005, 10:16 AM

Well, all the applications were installed new on the new PB from the installers. The work files were copied from the old G4 tower to an external HDD then onto the new PB so I guess there may be some permissions problems there, but I can't see any way round that, the work needs to get from the old mac to the new. The transfer software only works from OSX to OSX, so no good here.

I did replace one of the 512Mb sticks with a 256 and noticed an immediate speed boost. It hasn't sorted out all the system level problems though. There were loads of threads a while ago in the networking forum about airport not liking 1 gig of ram, but I thought 10.3.7 had this licked (?)

This weekends task will be to format the drive on the PB and start again from the system discs. I imagine called apple will be a waste of time until I have exhausted software/memory possibilities.

Joy.