[kisol007]

I am curious? How often to you experience a crash in OS X? I think this is important to see what people are experiencing! Everyone says that OS X NEVER crashes... right. It does crash now and then. But how frequently?

I have two Macs running OS X and one crashes probably once a day! The other almost never crashes...

And by a crash lets say you have to reboot. Not a finder restart or anything like that.

So what is everyone else's experience? Honestly...

[Sarc]

the only thing that crashes OS X for me is the crappy SMB implementation it has ... otherwise ... rock solid

[zachs]

At least once a week.

I usually have about 10-15 apps or so open at once (including some "big" ones like Photoshop and DreamWeaver), a few browser windows, and iTunes which really bogs down the CPU.

I dunno...maybe it's my computer (TiBook 400 with 386 MB of RAM).

[Spliff]

The only time OS X crashes for me is when some third-party system mod messes things up. For instance, if I change the preferences for Default Folder in a certain order, my entire system go into beachball mode. I can move the mouse but I can't switch to or open any app: everything goes beachball on me.


But I haven't had a kernel panic in over a year and the last one was due to using an old version of Hotline in Classic mode.

[dlefebvre]

Sine 10.2 I never crashed more than once a month, but I used to crash frequently with 10.2.5 (4 or 5 times a week). Since 10.2.6 came out, I didn't crash once. (I will probably crash in the next 5 minutes, due to Karma)

[Since EBCDIC]

I've been using OS X since 21 March 2001, two days early. Never, ever had a crash or panic until two days ago.

It might have something to do with Thoth, Acquisition, and Bittorrent all downloading at the same time, or a stray neutrino, but my perfect record is gone.

I was away, having a life. Then I came home, only to enjoy this multi-lingual nugget from Apple:

[Krypton]

I used to have quite a few crashes with freezing screensavers and waking from sleep - but ever since I disabled screensavers for good I've not had a crash yet!

[dopik]

I am using OS X since the public beta and it has never crashed on me. I only restart the computer when software update requires it. For me, OS X is rock solid.

dopik

[kovacs]

I really can't remember my last crash on my iMac 500 and I have never had a kernal panic, my iBook freezes sometimes when doing network related things in the finder ( SMB browsing, FTP, ... ) but in general OSX is super stable...

[Peter]

Dunno when OSX last crashed, sure some apps become unrespsonsive, but thats hardly a crash.

[damosan]

Originally posted by kisol007:
So what is everyone else's experience? Honestly...

I've had my iBook lock up two times since I've had it. One time I was using it on a very hot day, in a very hot room, on a very bad table. I think it overheated. Anyway...it was kernel panic city.

That was early last summer.

The other time it locked up hard was when I tried to run VPC 6.0 on it...VPC6 just did NOT care for my iBook. I had to go back to 5.0.

That's been it so far (knock on wood). It's been the most stable computer I've ever owned...besides my 1980s Atari 800.

Damo

[iNeusch]

i never crash... maybe I'm lucky

[dampeoples]

In a year and a half, about 5 times on two different machines I think.

[wulf]

I've been using OS X on-and-off since the Beta, and full-time since 10.1. I've had one kernal panic in that time (it was in 10.0 I think) and two, maybe three times where a machine has locked up, and I haven't had the time or patience to wait and see if it was some busy process that would eventually work itself out.

A few times I've had a machine go apparently completely unresponsive, then after 10 or 20 minutes finish thinking about whatever thing was obsessing it and return to normal. Obviously that's an unacceptably long time to wait if one is trying to get work done, but a welcome change from the kind of hard freezes we all used to get in the pre-X Mac OS.

[mdc]

the last time osX crashed on me (kernel panic) was when my pc-using-friend walked into my room and decided that the exact moment my ipod was syncing and it was being used as a firewire hdd was the exact moment in time he would pull it out the dock.

my "noooooooooooo!" was too late.
kernel panic.

that was a few weeks ago, other than that i think that osX is stable.

[Ron Goodman]

I've been using X since the Public Beta. The only panic I ever saw was when trying to upgrade Norton Utilites to 7.0.something.

[cambro]

If you are experiencing frequent crashes in 10, then something is, quite simply, out of order.

Here are the likely culprits:

1) Third party hacks/kernel extensions
2) USB device maddness
3) Really, really screwed up permissions or an error in the disk directory
4) Hardware failure (faulty logic board, cheap-butt RAM, etc).
5) did I menion 3rd party hacks/kernel extensions??

[Boochie]

Anytime I make the mistake of following an ftp link from Safari, I get a full-blown system lockup. It appears that Safari uses the finder to perform ftp, which is notoriously unstable. I wish there were an option to display ftp links within Safari, as you can with Chimera and IE.

[rogerb]

Originally posted by cambro:
If you are experiencing frequent crashes in 10, then something is, quite simply, out of order.

Here are the likely culprits:

1) Third party hacks/kernel extensions
2) USB device maddness
3) Really, really screwed up permissions or an error in the disk directory
4) Hardware failure (faulty logic board, cheap-butt RAM, etc).
5) did I menion 3rd party hacks/kernel extensions??

I'm sure all 5 of your points could cause a system crash/kernel panic. However, I can only speak to one of them - third-party apps.

The only crash/kernel panic I experienced was traced to the third-party utility Cocktail. The system freeze occured when I inserted a CF Adapter into the PC slot. The kernel panic occured when I removed the adapter. Once Cocktail was uninstalled the problem disappeared.

Hate those crashes/freezes/kernel panics.

[chris v]

I have the finder lock up on me real good once in a while.

I've only had maybe 2 kernel panics since 10.2 but quite a few beach ball episodes.

Sometimes, I'll go a month without one, but that's a rare stretch. Usually a week to 10 days is max.

There's other problems that force me to restart occasionally too, like the Adobe font problem, and the Adobe Keyboard shortcut problem, and I've had my external burner lock up Toast on me a couple times.


CV

[Sarah31]

i've never had a crash. the closest i came was the other day when camino was being fidgitey. in this case i ended out rebooting to kill the zombie camino had created.

i had the first release on an old bondi imac and i had a few crashes there and had to force quit stuff quite often.

[:XI:]

I've only seen the fancy KP screen in 10.2 twice ad KP'd in 10.1 once.

I usually restart anywhere between once a week and once a month due to hordes of ATSServers bogging something down/not dying off.

Had Quicktime go ga-ga once, could force quit it it and ended up restarting, though the next time it happens, I'm going to kill the WindowServer and get spat out at the log in window.

Overall, it's the least crash prone computer I've used. (Excluding my amiga, but that doesn't have a hard disk )

[Judge_Fire]

Using 10.2, never a KP on any of the three Macs I use, even if they have a bunch of third- party SW installed.

But about once in a month I experience a forced logout, where all apps quit and I find myself at the login screen (except for one of the machines which automatically logs in its main user).

This usually happens when the Finder has trouble, like multiple large file copies to/from network disks.

J

[TheTraveller]

OS X is for me pretty stable - a hundred times more stable, at least, than OS 9 was. But I've had about 4-5 KP's since I've been using it (DP 3) and a few times where I've been forced to restart the machine because of the endless spinning beachball, etc.

[philzilla]

iDisk pretty much brings my OS X macs to a halt, causing me to have to resort to some ssh action to kill PIDs

[sideus]

My dual 867 has yet to crash.

[Don Pickett]

I think I've had two or three crashes since 10.1. One way my fault - I was trying to force Open GL to do things it wasn't meant to do with 8 megs of VRAM. The other crash I remember was some sort of conflict between two firewall monitoring programs.

Currently on 20 days of uptime.

[Rainy Day]

I've been using OS X since 21 March 2001, two days early.

Well, that would be three days early as MacOS X made its debut on 24-March-2001.

[Gul Banana]

I dimly remember crashes, back in the Past of 10.1 or maybe even 10.0, but I honestly cannot remember the last one on either Powermac I use. My iBook, I can - I was at a LAN party back in October running 10.2.0 and heavy use of SMB was causing kernel panics.

[kisol007]

Well, it really looks like most people do not experience that many crashes. That is not the case for one of the macs I use... but that is pretty sweet none the less.

So what kind of utilities do people use to keep their system up and running? If any?

[Nick_G]

The only time OS X has crashed has been when I've been using Roxio Toast Titanium. A couple of times when I've tried to burn another session onto an ISO 9660 disc, the whole system froze into spinning beachball mode and the Mac needed restarting. On one occasion when I was still using 10.1 the crash was so bad I eventually had to pull the plug.

Very annoying.

[Nick_G]

I've never had a kernel panic though.

[exa]

I have my fair share of crashes, every few weeks. Had one last night actually, was watching a corrupted movie in mplayer and it paused, my system died (no kernel panic). I couldn't ssh into my machine to kill the process either.

I have had only 3 kernel panics since owning this machine (since last october), two were me playing with certain kernel extensions and one was truly a crash.

I've had a lot of beach balls of deaths, especially in finder mounting operations and these seem to completely hose my system (eg mount a remote volume, shut down that computer, die!)...

[Ricky]

I can personally guarantee a kernal panic if I unplug the USB Apple Pro Speakers from my Cube. This is how it'll go: I'm listening to something in iTunes, my audio will stop working or become heavily muted, I unplug the speakers in hopes of getting them to come back to life, here comes the kernal panic.

Other than that, I've never had anything else cause a system wide crash.

[wtmcgee]

i have had ZERO lockups, or crashes that has caused me to restart my machine.

the worst thing that's ever happened to me is finder went haywire and i had to force quit, then logout and back in.

[trusted_content]

I've been running my install of OS X server since February 8th. Had exactly one crash (it was a kernel panic) since then. One of those durn "locking against myself" errors, it had me scratchin the ol' head you better believe it!

[Sage]

I've had two crashes on my iBook. The first one was caused by MetamorphX, which was a badly supported theme changer (and in fact is now considered defunct, since it has stopped development), so this obviously can't be blamed in any way on OS X. The second one was a really unexpected kernal panic... I was opening Dreamweaver, turned around to look for something, and when I turned back I had the multi-language overlay looking at me.

Haven't had a problem since.

Gawd, OS X is incredibly solid. I remember the days of using OS 7-9... hated how application freezes locked up everything... I became very familiar with the little black and white bomb.

[fireside]

two kernal panics on 10.1. not one crash or kernal panic on 10.2, its rock solid baby. just like, well, you know.

[Mr Scruff]

Try using the included amd and you will see crashes (or at least hangs) a'plenty on a daily basis...

[awe]

Well, since 10.2 I experience lot's of problems. I've to reinstall MacOS X at least after 2 to 3 weeks. I'm not experiencing a kernel panic. It usually starts after booting up the system. After the boot panel it takes forever. So I do a reset. Afterwards my boot partition is nuked and if I'm unlucky my data partition is dead too. Currently MacOS X reminds me of the System 7.x days... Looks like I've to go back to 10.1 or switch the platform.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by awe:
Well, since 10.2 I experience lot's of problems. I've to reinstall MacOS X at least after 2 to 3 weeks. I'm not experiencing a kernel panic. It usually starts after booting up the system. After the boot panel it takes forever. So I do a reset. Afterwards my boot partition is nuked and if I'm unlucky my data partition is dead too. Currently MacOS X reminds me of the System 7.x days... Looks like I've to go back to 10.1 or switch the platform.

Sounds more like a hardware problem to me.

And to kisol007 do you mean OSX crashes or application crashes. OSX itself never crashed on me, except for 1 KP that appeared after putting my previous G4 to sleep with a DVD still in the drive.

[TommyLeeRoth]

Originally posted by awe:
Well, since 10.2 I experience lot's of problems. I've to reinstall MacOS X at least after 2 to 3 weeks. I'm not experiencing a kernel panic. It usually starts after booting up the system. After the boot panel it takes forever. So I do a reset. Afterwards my boot partition is nuked and if I'm unlucky my data partition is dead too. Currently MacOS X reminds me of the System 7.x days... Looks like I've to go back to 10.1 or switch the platform.

My money is on a dying hard drive. I had the same problem...twice.

[ervier]

I've had some freezes, maybe two or three since 10.0. One time I had a kernel-panic, probably due to an upgrade of iTunes. That was 10.1.? I believe.

I reinstalled several times, until I decided to restart after every upgrade. When I upgraded iTunes, that caused the problem, although nobody else seemed to have it. So I reinstalled once again, now without the iTunes upgrade. That worked perfect, and after the nex system upgrade, iTunes could be upgraded without problem.

And then I realized how easy and quick reinstalling the system is compared to Windows. It took me about three hours on average, after which I had my normal desktop back and everything. Of course I had my account on a different partition, so that wasn't affected.

[kisol007]

Powaqqatsi

No, I am talking about OS freezes, KP, and the like. I've had a few applications quit, but only a couple times have they brought down the whole OS.

My guess is that my machine that I experience so many crashes on has some bad hardware somewhere. It is an old B&W and has been hacked together pretty good.

...

[malvolio]

Originally posted by Spliff:
The only time OS X crashes for me is when some third-party system mod messes things up. For instance, if I change the preferences for Default Folder in a certain order, my entire system go into beachball mode. I can move the mouse but I can't switch to or open any app: everything goes beachball on me.

That's a freeze, not a crash. Odds are, if you just let it sit there, it would eventually unfreeze.

[donutogre]

i've had my powerbook for 2 months, and i've had it crash once...but what a crash.

it was the dreaded kernel panic, and it wasn't your average one...i had to call applecare and do some stuff off the boot cd...i didn't reinstall everything, but my system was nearly ruined...it was pretty scary. fortunatly things have been fine since then.

[IUJHJSDHE]

Crashed 2 times in the long long time I have had it.

Time one, Playing with smbmount, it lagged... Kernel panic!
Time two, using dialup while my waiting for my cable modem. Only unexplained panic I have ever had.

I have 3 computers, Running Mac OS X, OS 9, and Linux.

Linux: Pritty much never crashed, ever.
OS 9: I lost count at around 100
OS X: Twice.

OS X has been very very stable, much more then OS 9.

Current uptime on OS X, 44 days, 7 hours.

[Josh Reid]

For me, an occassional but rare kernel panic, although I had them maybe six times a week with 10.2.5. However, 10.2.6 seems to have done away with this problem.

My next-door neighbors are standard light users of an iMac 500, and after I upgraded their system to 10.2.5, their computer became almost unusable, crashing with a kernel panic 5-6 times a day. Again, 10.2.6 has fixed the problem.

-Josh

[laxthxdude]

Just using SMB and killing the remote volumes without disconnecting them first from OS X. It really doesnt like that.

I also had one try to watch a DVD, but I had just updated Quicktime and it told me to restart and I decided not to.

Other than that, its a marvelous thing!

[tikki]

Ever since 10.2.6, I have had a lot less stability with my system. I am tempted to just format, and go back to 10.2.5