[bergy]

Hello everybody ..

I was reading the sticky on freezes, kernel panics and crashes.
I'm pretty clear on system freezes ... everything stops .. the mouse won't move .. and you have to do a hard shut down ..

Do you think most system freezes are due to bad ram, logic boards, or processors and in what order?

What about an app freeze? Does this happen a lot? What are its characteristics?
What usually are the causes and how do you fix it?

Thanks for any info ...

[Big Mac]

Detrius provided a pretty thorough explanation of the terms he used. Hard freezing in OS X would be due to a hardware issue. It is important to note, however, that at times an application can freeze in the foreground and monopolize the whole screen, preventing anything else from coming to the fore. The system may seem frozen, but appearances can be deceiving. In my opinion, application freezes are most often due to the immaturity of the applications in question. At this point application freezes should be seen very infrequently; they were more common at the dawn of OS X's existence.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Detrius provided a pretty thorough explanation of the terms he used. Hard freezing in OS X would be due to a hardware issue. It is important to note, however, that at times an application can freeze in the foreground and monopolize the whole screen, preventing anything else from coming to the fore.

Normally you can use cmd-tab to get out of them, though, or cmd-opt-esc to bring up the Force Quit panel. As a last resort you can always ssh in from another machine and kill the process from the commandline

[Big Mac]

Back in Jaguar I was working with a Classic app when Classic died in the foreground, leaving a dead window in the fore. The funny thing is, while I could interact with OS X at the edges of the screen (including the dock), I could not do anything in the middle region because the window was blocking native apps from coming to the fore. No command+tab and no force quit, not even force quit followed by the return key. Finally I had the idea to open System Preferences and get to the Classic pane. After manipulating the window I was finally able to get to the force quit button, and then all was well. If I had had Escape Pod or SSH on I would have had a some other options.