[wallfly54]

Hi All:

I had this problem on and off again, always after some upgrade. I fixed it once by downgrading Airport to Version 3.2. Then I let Software Upgrade do its thing on Airport in a weak moment. I made the mistake of upgrading Airport and the problem re-appeared. So for me and my Pismo (500Mhz + Airport (old version + 764Mb RAM), I can now confirm this fixes the problem every time.

DOWNGRADE AIRPORT TO VERSION 3.2! Never, ever go higher. I have tested this with Bittorrent, Email, Web running simultaneously and it worked flawlessly. Upgrade Airport and bang, its pretty much useless for Internet! I can only do either email or web (not both), and bittorrent lasts about 60 seconds before a freeze. Read elsewhere in this forum for instructions on how to downgrade.

Good luck!

[willrob]

Obviously some people are experiencing freezes due to their Airport updates. but others�myself included�experience the lock ups without ever having installed any Airport updates. I don't have an Airport card, but the Apple updaters will often update a number of features of the OS, and possibly I've had Airport updated without my knowledge.

So I'm wondering:

Can I safely remove all instances of Airport technology from my system, without problems?

Where would the parts be? Nothing turns up with a search for Airport.

Would installing the Airport 3.4.1 update make any change, even though i lack the hardware (card, basestation)? Software update is always telling me to update this, but I've never bothered, since I'm not using the technology.

william

[Big Mac]

I don't know if you should remove the AirPort drivers but you can do so at your own risk. If you take a look at the System Profiler Software -> Extensions display, you'll see that there are two major AirPort kexts (kernel extensions) named AirPort.kext and Airport2.kext located at: "/System/Library/Extensions/" The thing is, if you don't have an AirPort card those kexts should not be loaded (System Profiler displays their status), and if they're not loaded they theoretically shouldn't have any effect on your system. So throwing them out probably wouldn't do much good, as far as I can tell.

[RealMac]

ok, I'm running 10.3.2 without the Java update, obviously without the 10.3.3 update, w/o any airport update and without the quicktime 6.5.1 update. I'm also running Acquisition in the background along with processes that are collectively using 369 threads on my system.

18:04 up 5 days, 7:58, 1 user, load averages: 1.52 2.26 2.75

Anyone else with a similar config reporting returned system stability?

[ginoledesma]

Airport 3.3 and 3.4.1 are finally stable on me. No more crashing (for now).

[willrob]

Is it normal for a G4 to restart itself after a crash? Here's the situatiuon. I get a freeze (see my previous posts, or anybody elses, for that matter). I do one of two things. I hold in the start up button on the front of my G4 and the screen goes black and the machine reboots. Just what one would expect.

The other thing I sometimes do (especially when tired), is turn off the power on the surge protector, which sits on my desktop and is easier to reach. Power to all devices is cut off. If I then give up for the day and go to bed or go for a walk and reboot when I wake up or come home, the computer starts up as normal.

BUT if, after waiting a half minute or so, I turn the power back on , via the surge protector, after a few seconds the computer will boot itself, just as it would had I pressed the start-up button.

I don't believe I've ever noticed this behavior in the past. Another aspect to this might be the failure I sometimes have of properly shutting down. I can select shut down or restart, either from the menu or via keyboard commands, and the OS goes through most of its routines but hangs on the last stage�when the power would be cut off. I'm not sure these two items are linked, but there might be a connection.

[Link]

Go into system preferences -> Energy Saver -> Options

See if "Restart automatically after a power failure" is checkmarked.

There could be other reasons, but this would be a good one.

[willrob]

Yup. That's what it was. Thanks.

>>Go into system preferences -> Energy Saver -> Options

See if "Restart automatically after a power failure" is checkmarked.<<

[Azzgunther]

So, after reading the features on the upcoming 10.3.4 update, I'm left disappointed. If they'd fixed this bug I'm sure they would have mentioned it, right? Or is Apple too proud to admit they have a serious problem to address?

[Azzgunther]

If anybody downloads the 10.3.4 update, be sure to report back here on how it performs.

[RealMac]

I don't know why, but my 10.3.3 system stayed up for a whole 9 days. That was with using P2P apps such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and Acquisition. So far I've been using P2P apps fairly heavily with no problems so far. Perhaps the gui lock up issue has been addressed?

[RealMac]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
So, after reading the features on the upcoming 10.3.4 update, I'm left disappointed. If they'd fixed this bug I'm sure they would have mentioned it, right? Or is Apple too proud to admit they have a serious problem to address?

Not necessarily. I'm sure there are a lot of modifications to each kernel revision (assuming that was one of the triggers for this) that just can't be summed up in a paragraph. I'd rather have it fixed without mentioned in the docs than not fixed with continued energy expended on tracking it down, user complaints, etc. Of course if OSX was totally open source, we'd know about each and every change.

That and Apple probably doesn't want to call bad press to itself and admit a problem to begin with. Just think of how many hardware issues were silently resolved.

Otoh, look at the white spots issue which they claimed to be very isolated until we saw thousands of units affected with the problem.

[Azzgunther]

I don't really care whether or not they announce a fix, to be honest. I just wish they'd fix the blasted thing. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people with the same symptoms and judging by the responses on Apple's boards today, 10.3.4 hasn't fixed the freezing issue.

I'll make a deal Apple: if you fix the bug and let us have usable computers, you don't have to announce it? Mmmk ?

[RealMac]

Originally posted by Azzgunther:
I don't really care whether or not they announce a fix, to be honest. I just wish they'd fix the blasted thing. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people with the same symptoms and judging by the responses on Apple's boards today, 10.3.4 hasn't fixed the freezing issue.

I'll make a deal Apple: if you fix the bug and let us have usable computers, you don't have to announce it? Mmmk ?

Ahh, I just know that I haven't experienced the bug lately. It seemed to go away after I upgraded to newer versions of limewire (4.04) and acquisition (109.1).

[Link]

I can confirm this bug still exists in 10.3.4. I opened up mail and decided to click on the junk folder to look through it and of course, the computer froze when it displayed the junk list.

Grrrrrrr..... I can't believe it's still there after 8 months!

[CallumM]

well i don't know if it was 10.3.4 update that fixed it for me. But I also tried taking out one stick of RAM, and i haven't had this lockup or any crashes for several days now. I suspect it was due to incompatible RAM (at least for me anyway)

I've updated Panther with EVERY update that comes into SU including Airport even though i don't have an airport card

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by Link:
I can confirm this bug still exists in 10.3.4. I opened up mail and decided to click on the junk folder to look through it and of course, the computer froze when it displayed the junk list.

Grrrrrrr..... I can't believe it's still there after 8 months!

Link, have you tried the defraging method as a fix for this?

*gasp* it really does work.

Since I defraged once and added some RAM, I have had no problem on my G5 AT ALL...


Over at ARS they identified the problem and the fix. Defrag... don't know why, but it works.

It really is worth a shot.

[Link]

How do I defrag without spending $50-80 to do so?

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Link:
How do I defrag without spending $50-80 to do so?

Do a complete reformat.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by Link:
How do I defrag without spending $50-80 to do so?

This is a problem to be sure, but I'm sure that for a purely one off purpose only, there may be means at your disposal... *cough* BT.

[Dizzypaint]

I seem to be having a similar problem, but the situation is a little different. My machine is a B&W G3 with a 900MHz card in it, plus three internal HDs. One drive is the orginal 6GB split between OS 9.2 and OS 10.2.8. The second drive is a Maxtor 40GB with 10.3.3. The third drive is a WD 120GB that had 10.3.3 and was upgraded to 10.3.4. All of them work fine and had had no lockups to speak of. The 10.3.4 has been my main use since upgrading it on the day it became available. My machine also has a Wacom Graphire tablet on it. The machine runs 24/7, I don't turn it off unless I absolutely have to.

Everything worked perfectly until yesterday. I logged in to my normal desktop, started Safari and went to a couple standard webpages. Suddenly, the mouse acted a little funny and it seemed like everything locked up, but the mouse, which moved eratically. It lasted about 20-30 seconds and then everything worked normally, including the Wacom mouse and the second standard USB mouse I have. That lasted for about a minute and then the same thing occurred again. Since then the situation is work for a minute , freeze for 30 seconds, work, freeze, ad infinitum. If iTunes is running I actually hear the music stop for the 30 seconds.

I have tried all of the fixes mentioned in this thread except re-installing. But my situation is slightly different in that the lockups occur not only in 10.3.4, but ALL of my OSX installations, the 10.2.8 and 10.3.3 included. The OS9 installation works fine and I have no such lockups.

Any ideas on what would have suddenly affected all three OSX installations to cause such lockups while I was working in 10.3.4?

[Link]

Originally posted by Dizzypaint:
Everything worked perfectly until yesterday. I logged in to my normal desktop, started Safari and went to a couple standard webpages. Suddenly, the mouse acted a little funny and it seemed like everything locked up, but the mouse, which moved eratically. It lasted about 20-30 seconds and then everything worked normally, including the Wacom mouse and the second standard USB mouse I have. That lasted for about a minute and then the same thing occurred again. Since then the situation is work for a minute , freeze for 30 seconds, work, freeze, ad infinitum. If iTunes is running I actually hear the music stop for the 30 seconds.

I've actually had this one myself.. generally though the freeze-crash is the one that happens 9 out of 10 times.

[Dizzypaint]

I tried re-installing the the 10.3.4 load on my B&W G3. This included a complete reformat of the harddrive and a clean installation of 10.3 then upgraded to 10.3.4. This did not solve the problem of recurrent lockups. In fact, the lockups occurred throughout the installation while I was booted from the Panther installation CD.

The only change is that the length of the lockups has increased from about 30 seconds to about 60 seconds.

This seems very strange to me. How could the upgrade on one drive from 10.3.3 to 10.3.4 (plus Quicktime, security, and iTunes upgrades) impact the OSX installations on other drives (10.2.8 and 10.3.3) , which were functioning perfectly, such that all of them immediately start suffering the same problem, but the OS9.2 drive doesn't?

I am only using Safari, Mail, and iTunes, and not more than one of them at a time. I don't have Airport, but do have an ethernet router.

I have used OSX on this machine since it first came out, and other than a few small glitches with 10.0 and 10.1 it has always performed well for me. However, now the machine is practically unusable as it works for 60 seconds, then locks up for 60 seconds, repeat until stress level breached.

I have tried all of the various fixes shown above and had no luck. I have not made any hardware or software changes to this machine, other than the upgrades mentioned, for quite awhile. I am at a complete loss as to what is causing this.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Dizzypaint:
I tried re-installing the the 10.3.4 load on my B&W G3. This included a complete reformat of the harddrive and a clean installation of 10.3 then upgraded to 10.3.4. This did not solve the problem of recurrent lockups. In fact, the lockups occurred throughout the installation while I was booted from the Panther installation CD.

The only change is that the length of the lockups has increased from about 30 seconds to about 60 seconds.

This seems very strange to me. How could the upgrade on one drive from 10.3.3 to 10.3.4 (plus Quicktime, security, and iTunes upgrades) impact the OSX installations on other drives (10.2.8 and 10.3.3) , which were functioning perfectly, such that all of them immediately start suffering the same problem, but the OS9.2 drive doesn't?

I am only using Safari, Mail, and iTunes, and not more than one of them at a time. I don't have Airport, but do have an ethernet router.

I have used OSX on this machine since it first came out, and other than a few small glitches with 10.0 and 10.1 it has always performed well for me. However, now the machine is practically unusable as it works for 60 seconds, then locks up for 60 seconds, repeat until stress level breached.

I have tried all of the various fixes shown above and had no luck. I have not made any hardware or software changes to this machine, other than the upgrades mentioned, for quite awhile. I am at a complete loss as to what is causing this.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

I think people are having different issues.. The ones most described in this thread are when it completely freezes (except mouse movement) during heavy net access & iTunes usage..

[Zim]

Originally posted by Busemann:
I think people are having different issues.. The ones most described in this thread are when it completely freezes (except mouse movement) during heavy net access & iTunes usage..

I believe it can be generalized to "heavy net access" and "something else". The "something else" for many people is iTunes (for me it was never the case, but just about "anything else" was likely to cause a lockup.

Mike

[Azzgunther]

Defragging does help for a few weeks. I suppose I'm resigned to defragging weekly to maintain a working Panther installation

[nforcer]

I've been running over 10 days on 10.3.4 without a freeze. 1602417 pageins and 1008032 pageouts so far. I've pushed it hard, trying to get it to freeze. I ran several bittorrent files, transferred a dozen GB between HDs, launched apps and quit them, compiled a few apps in XCode, had iTunes playing, and browsed webpages in Safari all at the same time, trying to kill it. It's still alive. After consistent heavy use and the aforementioned "death test" I'm under the impression the problem is gone.

I'll post again if I experience another freeze.

[Krypton]

I've just had my first Panther freeze for quite some time.

Occurred during some heavy disk access - trying to save in Photoshop, with lots of tabs open in OmniWeb and copying from a disk image.

[Busemann]

Here it seems to often happen while the applications are writing to the disk, like when iTunes is updating its Library file (causing a corrupted Library when the computer is rebooted again )

[Krypton]

Even though I've tried to remain calm, I wish Apple would get their arse into gear.

[Link]

yeah me too, it seems to happen almost every 3 days though for me :| Always during heavy usage, of course!

Whenever I am doing something and the comp starts to 'stutter' I reach for the restart button and wait for the clock to freeze.. that's how it's been lol.

It'd be nice if there was something like the activity monitor that made logs

[chromos]

Hmm, interesting discussion. I'm having the lock-up about once a day too. It started only about 2 weeks ago, though, and I don't know what triggered the change. I installed some Maxtor stuff for an external FW HD, and also Office 2004, before the problems occurred. And various Apple security updates, etc.

I will try the Airport downgrade because I was on vacation last week and my PowerBook was only using dial-up and nary a freeze occurred, even with heavy use, so they look related. Still, I'd like to know why it suddenly started occurring.

[RealMac]

Originally posted by chromos:
Hmm, interesting discussion. I'm having the lock-up about once a day too. It started only about 2 weeks ago, though, and I don't know what triggered the change. I installed some Maxtor stuff for an external FW HD, and also Office 2004, before the problems occurred. And various Apple security updates, etc.

I will try the Airport downgrade because I was on vacation last week and my PowerBook was only using dial-up and nary a freeze occurred, even with heavy use, so they look related. Still, I'd like to know why it suddenly started occurring.

After upgrading to 10.3.4 and airport 3.4.2 my kernel panics / gui freezes have gone away. At 5 days uptime now. You might want to check your startup items / process listing to see if there are any apps that execute at login you don't know about. I'd pay attention to the panic.log and console.log files to see what is active when the system crashes.

Good luck.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by RealMac:
After upgrading to 10.3.4 and airport 3.4.2 my kernel panics have gone away. At 5 days uptime now. You might want to check your startup items / process listing to see if there are any apps that execute at login you don't know about. I'd pay attention to panic.log files to see what is active when the system crashes.

Good luck.

The problems most people are experiencing in this thread aren't kernel panics but rather erratic pointer freezes.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by nforcer:
I'll post again if I experience another freeze.

Had another freeze last night while playing an Open Source 3d game, Cube 0.5. The music to the first track ended, and then everything just froze (could not change apps, force quit, etc.). I had iChat running in the background, and the other apps (Safari, TextEdit, Terminal, and Finder) were idle. Running 10.3.4. Had an uptime of a little under a day.

Trying to track this down is getting annoying.

[Link]

Big Mac: There's 2 varieties of the freeze, and I can say I've experienced both first hand many times:

Type 1: Pointer is still active but the rest of the machine is totally frozen. Won't reply to incoming SSH requests or pings.

Type 2: Pointer stutters and machine jumps in and out of frozen every few seconds/minutes -- sometimes you CAN ssh in but most of the time that doesn't really do any good..

To me what triggers the most popular (the freezup but mouse movement taken) one is the following:

*Opening a browser window
*launching an IRC connection
*loading the junk mailbox in mail
*searching for something in mail
*mounting a disk image

Those would be the most common that come to mind

[JellyBeen]

For me, it would be playing an OSX game. Could be an open GL problem due to my ATI 128 rage card..poor thing :-)
Safari is implicated aswell.

[Sealobo]

damn... this is driving me nuts... my system (10.3.4 + original TiBook) goes to freeze at least once everyday now. Everything stops except the mouse cursor. Basically I was only running Safari and Proteus....

I believe the Airport is causing the problem.

[Jerommeke]

same problem, mostly related to thhe use of itunes. the menu meter indicated all of a sudden a cpu usage of 100%, and then the computer willnot respond and:

1. be incapable of any action done with the mouse (which is stuttering)
2. freezing the mouse over portions of time.

And I got no airport

[pat++]

Got the freeze again with latest airport and OS updates (10.3.4).
It's definitely NOT related to iTunes as each time I get the freeze, iTunes is not running. My best bet in Airport. iChat was trying to reconnect after the Airport signal got too weak.
(Notice here I'm talking about the freeze where the mouse is still moving very smoothly).

If you wait long enough, your Mac will come back to life (usually 1-2mn).
Apple needs to fix this. This is really unacceptable.

[Link]

I find it funny but almost everyone's pet 'chore' that kills the machine is different..

For some it's running itunes..

for others it's airport..

for some it's games

and then there's disk image mounting. This is funny ;D

[Spliff]

The following was posted over at Apple's Discussion pages regarding this problem (their thread is over 600 posts long):

After thinking long about it and and discussing the symtpoms with my dad, who used to work in network standardization and system level programming, we also came to the conclusion that the problem may very well be a deadlock situation between two layers in the network stack which is much more likely to happen when both of these conditions are fulfilled:

a.) there's a lot of traffic and
b.) the network connection is not stable.

As I already wrote in an earlier post:

Conclusion: I think this, together with several other reports in this thread, is evidence enough that there is something going wrong in one of the network layers. It seems that an unreliable network connection, like close to the perimeter of an AirPort range, or a bad router or physically bad connection, can lead to dead locks of applications requesting network access.

IMO, it is possible that communication between some layers in the network stack is producing that under the very rare circumstance that a request for network is coming in a the very moment the connection breaks down. The layer then has no chance to give feedback that the connection is not available and the application just hangs there for the request to be answered.

Source: http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]/610

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Spliff:
The following was posted over at Apple's Discussion pages regarding this problem (their thread is over 600 posts long):



Source: http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]/610

Interesting.. Wonder why iTunes (audio) so often is involved though..

[Jerommeke]

And I think it also has to do with long running times. It always occurs in the evening, when the computer has been running for something like 12 hours or more.

I have waited some time to see if it would solve itself, however it didn't. After 2 minutes it starts freezing the mouse on intervals, and then it becomes totally unrepsonsive. After 15 minutes I ended up restarting.

It also seems it has to 'wait for disks' in the booting porcess next time, though that might be a natural thing.

[Link]

Originally posted by Jerommeke:
It also seems it has to 'wait for disks' in the booting porcess next time, though that might be a natural thing.

That's probably fsck checking your hard disk over really quick.

OS X can crash for me just about anytime, ESPECIALLY when loading disk images. This stuff has persisted through 3 reinstalls of 10.3 now.

Generally, it happens after 3 days of uptime for my g4. Ironically I bet after I finish getting this test disk image and mount it to burn, my machine will probably freeze.. watch and learn

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by Link:
That's probably fsck checking your hard disk over really quick.

OS X can crash for me just about anytime, ESPECIALLY when loading disk images. This stuff has persisted through 3 reinstalls of 10.3 now.

Generally, it happens after 3 days of uptime for my g4. Ironically I bet after I finish getting this test disk image and mount it to burn, my machine will probably freeze.. watch and learn

Link, ever thought that it could be your machine that is causing a lot of the crashes as you do seem to get more than most...

Still got Applecare on that dualie?

[Big Mac]

Similar to Placid's question, I'm wondering how many of the stricken machines have been turned over to Apple for a check-up.

[Zim]

I did 2 things:

- turned off CRASHREPORT
- stopped the exact combo of things that would usually cause my problem

and my problem has not recurred (started with 10.3.0 and reported to Apple in Nov 2003) in ~3 months. With 10.2.8 never a freeze.

Reproducible no more than 1 time in 10. No iTunes, no Airport. Blame the OS, not the hardware. I design embedded HW, I know what those failures look like.

Mike

[Spliff]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Similar to Placid's question, I'm wondering how many of the stricken machines have been turned over to Apple for a check-up.

My machine never, ever had this problem under Jaguar. As soon as I upgraded to Panther with it's new VM-management system, the freezes began. Defragging my HD fixes them until the fragmentation gets bad again. It's reproducible and it's clearly a flaw in the OS.

[Busemann]

Originally posted by Spliff:
My machine never, ever had this problem under Jaguar. As so as I upgraded to Panther with it's new VM-management system, the freezes began. Defragging my HD fixes them until the fragmentation gets bad again. It's reproducible and it's clearly a flaw in the OS.

Something tells me this is going to be fixed in 10.4 *crosses fingers*

Lets just hope it dont freeze too much during the bittorent leeching in a couple of weeks time