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abbaj · Mar 25, 2004, 02:07 PM

Well I thought my Titanium powerbook was fixed! I used combo updater 10.3.3 and repaired permissions etc, all appeared wll for several days. I had one lock up yesterday. Something in this whole process reduced the number of ccrashes ( waa 3 to 5 daily now 1 in three days)

Something is still honkered up here! I am running the airport update and do not want to go back.

I'm interested if those of you that have disabled the crash repoter have had 100% fix when running 10.3.3 and Current Airport?

TheTraveller · Mar 25, 2004, 09:46 PM

I disabled crash reporter, and I did get a freeze yesterday. I think that always when I've had these freezes it's been with Airport on, and I've been downloading tons of stuff with acqlite.

Krypton · Mar 26, 2004, 12:37 PM

I got a freeze quite randomly today, while I was surfing and checking my email. The mouse went really jerky like the good old PPP connect days... how I love Apple pff

TheTraveller · Mar 27, 2004, 08:55 PM

I had another everything-but-the-mouse freeze today, just now. Airport was turned OFF. What happened was I launched acqlite and I turned around and boom, frozen. acqlite is the one common thing in all my freezes now, I believe. The thing is, it hadn't actually started downloading anything yet.

pat++ · Mar 27, 2004, 09:43 PM

My turn now. 500mhz iBook here running 10.3.3 and all latest updates. I had 2 freezes yesterday (my first 2) in 30mn. I was not doing anything special... just using iChat for text chat. I didn't have any freeze before updating to 10.3.3, but i'm not sure it's related.
During both freezes, nothing else was working (just the mouse which was moving smoothly). I'm starting to believe this is network related... but just a guess here.
Apple needs to fix this urgently.

btw I'm connected with Airport too.

ginoledesma · Mar 27, 2004, 10:10 PM

Same hard freeze again. I noticed that I could still move the mouse around, but everything else stalled -- the clock (I have flashing separators and show the seconds), menumeter, the dock, applications, etc. However, when I click the mouse -- Boom! Hard freeze. During the stall, the machine can't be pinged, more so ssh'ed into.

It happened just after starting iTunes, playing a song, then quitting it. Then surfing wirelessly of course.

Sigh!

z|gzag · Mar 27, 2004, 10:28 PM

I used to have this problem too, but since around 10.3.2 (or possibly from doing repair permissions) mine seems fixed... its a very annoying problem, I know though, seemingly impossible to diagnose

Spudboy2004 · Mar 28, 2004, 06:18 AM

I had all the same problems that have been described here.
Bit Torrent, iTunes, and MacPar all frozen my computer.
The crashreporter fix and optimizing my hd (I'm now not going to get below 15Gb of free space) seem to have fixed my problems.

Apple needs to fix this, going into the Terminal app is not something I think about when being a Mac user. We (Apple computer owners) should not have to deal with these kind of problems.

Krypton · Mar 28, 2004, 06:44 AM

If you want Apple to know about this sign up for a free ADC online account and file a report at:

http://bugreporter.apple.com

I have, and have referenced both this thread and the 300 post thread at Apple discussions.

lrvk · 02:57 PM

I'm jumping in now, too. I followed this thread for some time because I have the exact same problems with panther 10.3.3 on my dual1 g4.

I tried the crashreporter fix, optimized all my hd's three days ago and just (5 minutes ago) had my first crash since then. Same story as ever.

Apps open: iTunes, BitTorrent, Safari, NewsFan and some haxies.

I know some others have other experiences, but I ALWAYS have iTunes open when lockups occur. And no, I don't always run iTunes :-)

As far as fixing the problem is concerned, I'm about to give up, now that even a tidy, totally defragmented drive with 30gb of space is still no solution.

[edit] Bug-report has been sent now, too, mentioning this thread. Apple should really fix this ASAP. It's annoying as hell and feels like using '9' again.

Spliff · Mar 29, 2004, 05:45 PM

Originally posted by Krypton:
If you want Apple to know about this sign up for a free ADC online account and file a report at:

http://bugreporter.apple.com

Where can I view a list of all outstanding bugs in Panther?

OwlBoy · Mar 29, 2004, 05:46 PM

Me too!

Damn it.

Open Apps: iTunes (The music played PERFECT, it just never went to the next track at the end.) Mail, Bittorrent, Safari, Photoshop (I was quitting it when the freeze started), NowPlaying.

Seems to be hard drive / hard drive activity related.

I noticed quite a few people had bittorrent open when it happened...

hmm

-Owl

Busemann · Mar 29, 2004, 06:27 PM

just defragged (it took a loong time

and freed up a lot of space on the drive, and have been running perfectly since (two torrents, poisoned and iTunes at once without probs for an hour)

Lets hope its fixed now

OwlBoy · Mar 29, 2004, 08:08 PM

Man, why do I have to buy an expensive piece of software to make my mac work?

-Owl

nforcer · Mar 29, 2004, 09:38 PM

BitTorrent + Safari + iTunes and active use in all 3 seems to be the easiest way to lead to a freeze.

k2director · Mar 29, 2004, 09:47 PM

I think a lot of these issues have to do with 10.3.3, and I've seen some strong evidence in the last day or so:

Since installing 10.3.3, my otherwise rock solid Dual 2Ghz G5 started freezing regularly--sometimes once a day, other times twice a day depending on what I was doing. Yesterday, I got to a point where Compressor would freeze the machine while doing an MPEG 2 export from Final Cut.

So I bit the bullet and did an Erase and Install back to 10.3.0. Then did the Combo update to 10.3.3. Reinstalled Final Cut/Compressor, and tried the export again: WHAMMO! My G5 froze. I rebooted and tried again....and yes, another freeze.

Next, I did ANOTHER bloody Erase and INstall back to 10.3.0. DID NOT update the OS from there. Just installed Final Cut and Compressor, and my Export worked perfectly. Then I updated my OS to 10.3.2 (which was rock solid for me before), and again, my export worked perfectly.

Leads me to believe that 10.3.3 has some destablizing tendencies....at least on certain hardware.

Suffice it to say, I'll be waiting until 10.3.4 before I consider another update!

TheTraveller · Mar 29, 2004, 09:55 PM

I don't think it has anything to do with 10.3.3 specifically. I think it has something to do with BitTorrent and/or acqlite and/or Limewire. I've had freezes with Limewire, and then with acqlite. That's the common thread for me. I haven't run acqlite since my last freeze...and gee, no freezes.

macgyvr64 · Mar 29, 2004, 10:11 PM

Originally posted by TheTraveller:
I don't think it has anything to do with 10.3.3 specifically. I think it has something to do with BitTorrent and/or acqlite and/or Limewire. I've had freezes with Limewire, and then with acqlite. That's the common thread for me. I haven't run acqlite since my last freeze...and gee, no freezes.

That could be, since both of my machines froze once while running BT ( what, are we all a bunch of pirates? :-P ), but a machine at work (dual 1ghz g4) froze, and it never had BT on the hard drive ever. Hmmh.

PeterKG · Mar 30, 2004, 01:01 AM

I decided to wipe and re-install. First I repaired permissions. Then I booted from the Panther disc and repaired my disk. Then I zeroed my hard drive before installing Panther and ran the combo updater. After all software installation I repaired permissions. I have had no freezes since and am running Cocktail nightly.

Krypton · Mar 30, 2004, 10:50 AM

Originally posted by Spliff:
Where can I view a list of all outstanding bugs in Panther?

After the notorious PPP hang bug they took the public bug database offline because people were getting angry that it showed next to no progress (which was what was happening).

Pierre B. · Apr 2, 2004, 05:57 AM

To people making reference to Airport Update 3.3: do you mean the AirPort Software Update 3.3.1 (03/01/04) or the AirPort Update 3.3 (01/27/04)?

The lock up happened to me too (Powerbook 12" 867 MHz, 100% Apple hardware, 10.3.3, all updates applied). Actually two lockups in 10 days. But I had the luck to have X11 working normally: the top command revealed that syslogd and automount had took up the CPU (45% each), and perhaps the disk activity too. So, in my case, this is what appeared like a crash.

Krypton · Apr 2, 2004, 02:43 PM

Apple have acknowledged my bug report, so they're working hard on this as we speak.

(If anyone has any less vague ideas about why this is happening, I'm sure devbugs would appreciate it).

bigwinky · Apr 2, 2004, 07:13 PM

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
Man, why do I have to buy an expensive piece of software to make my mac work?

-Owl

Isn't it the other way around?? --> 'why do i buy expensive software (PANTHER) that makes my mac NOT WORK?'

Something I'm kinda ticked about was that after sending 20 bug reports (most dealing with Safari crashes during multiple downloads, and then using a second or third program..any program), the only word I received from Apple was getting put on their mailing list. Just what I want.. an ad for PANTHER in reply to my non stop whining about PANTHER! Here's the redundant smilie again..

Anyone know of a suicide by handgun smilie??

I guess i shouldn't complain.. a broken panther is still better than working XP system...
bigwinky

Link · Apr 3, 2004, 01:14 AM

i did NOT have bit torrent open 99% of the time so there

After reinstalling totally (reformatted HD and alladat), the freezes/crashes are still present.. last time it happened when I was copying files

Oh well

ImpishLM · Apr 4, 2004, 10:43 AM

I had this freeze for a couple months, then fixed it by cleaning out the system caches using Panther Cache Cleaner.

After a month or two without problems, the 10.3.3 update brought it back.

This freeze is caused by the Crash Reporter; you probably know that, but thought I should mention it. Some Mac whizzes isolated the problem in Apple's forum.

Yesterday I reinstalled Panther 10.3, and now I'm wondering if I should do any of the updates at all. Do we know specifically which of the updates brought the problem in the first place?

macgyvr64 · Apr 4, 2004, 05:24 PM

Originally posted by ImpishLM:
Yesterday I reinstalled Panther 10.3, and now I'm wondering if I should do any of the updates at all.

I would...I usually install OS X and run Software Update until it stops :-P

Link · Apr 4, 2004, 05:30 PM

Yeah. One thing is that defragging will help.

I can't say it's been that helpful so far, however. There needs to be more redundancy with lookupd and crashreporter. Processes freezing and causing the ENTIRE MACHINE to lock up = BAD

nredman · Apr 4, 2004, 06:00 PM

i am running 10.3.3 on my 800mhz ibook G4 and i havent had any problems with panther ever...or with jaguar for that matter. i always read about people having crashes and freezes....i never see them...maybe because i dont run the apps others do or dont have all sorts of different add-ons connected to my mac...i dont know...i just don't ever crash???

Pierre B. · Apr 5, 2004, 04:52 AM

Originally posted by nredman:
i am running 10.3.3 on my 800mhz ibook G4 and i havent had any problems with panther ever...or with jaguar for that matter. i always read about people having crashes and freezes....i never see them...maybe because i dont run the apps others do or dont have all sorts of different add-ons connected to my mac...i dont know...i just don't ever crash???

I have experienced the Panther freezes twice in my Powerbook 12", which remains 100% Apple, hardware-wise. By the way, do you shutdown your iBook when you finish your work or you put it to sleep, until you need it again? Because it seems uptime makes a difference.

nforcer · Apr 5, 2004, 08:45 PM

Originally posted by ImpishLM:
I had this freeze for a couple months, then fixed it by cleaning out the system caches using Panther Cache Cleaner.

After a month or two without problems, the 10.3.3 update brought it back.

This freeze is caused by the Crash Reporter; you probably know that, but thought I should mention it. Some Mac whizzes isolated the problem in Apple's forum.

I heard of some people who disabled Crash Reporter and the freezes still happened to them.

Will try Panther Cache Cleaner soon, as I just experienced another freeze.

nforcer · Apr 5, 2004, 08:52 PM

All of my freezes that I can remember have occured when BitTorrent (Tomato Torrent) is running. I previously posted suspecting Safari, iTunes, and BitTorrent of being the cause of the problem. With my latest freeze happening while iTunes was not running I can eliminate that from being a possible problem.

Something I do with BT is save files to my external Firewire hard drives (try to keep fragmentation lower on the main drive). Does anyone else who has been experiencing freezes have Firewire hard drives connected? And how many who have been having freezes have been using BT at the time of the freeze?

Spliff · Apr 5, 2004, 09:38 PM

Originally posted by nforcer:
Does anyone else who has been experiencing freezes have Firewire hard drives connected? And how many who have been having freezes have been using BT at the time of the freeze?

Yes and yes, for me. I have both.

I defragged my boot drive and moved my downloads to the external drive. Since doing that, no freezes. And I defrag my drive every 3-4 weeks.

stux · Apr 6, 2004, 03:07 AM

Just got my usual panther freeze

(this is the one where the mouse goes jerky, and itunes pauses and then plays a few notes, then pauses, but the entire machine is locked up. And eventually the mouse will stop moving too)

Pings were responding, ssh couldn't be opened

I had disabled crashreporterd after the last 'event', so now I can say that disabling crashreporterd made no difference.

I was playing an iTunes song at the time, BT was downloading a single torrent at 54K/s, and I was compiling a large project in CodeWarrior.

So this translates to relatively heavy load.

(It is not actually related to any of these apps as I have had the same issue when all or none of them were running. I just think the problem is caused or exacerbated by actual heavy use (it works fine if you don't do anything

)

It often freezes when BT is doing something heavy... like checking 3 multi-gig torrents... or when compiling...

I do have a couple of FW disks connected (Oxford 911 and 922 chipsets), but they were not being actively used.

Right on schedule... its been about 2 weeks since the last one.

(10.3.0, 10.3.1, 10.3.2, 10.3.3, does not make a difference)

Krypton · Apr 6, 2004, 07:41 AM

I've just had another crash (after having installed the security update).

This time it crashed as OmniWeb was launching.

ImpishLM · Apr 6, 2004, 10:42 AM

As a follow-up to my message above, I've decided not to update after I re-installed 10.3. I now have a stable system, and I'm sticking with it.

I'll update when Apple specifically acknowledges the problem with Crash Reporter and fixes it.

bigwinky · Apr 6, 2004, 02:05 PM

Yesterday I had Safari 'unexpectedly quit' 8 times in a row. Today another 5 times. I won't go into the rest of the month... All of the Safari crashes happened when I was running 2-3 browser windows at once and/or with downloading files using Safari. Medal of Honor:AA 'unexpectedly quits' with that jerky mouse/sound crash everyone else describes. Regardless of program, all have unexpectedly quit at one point or another, even the finder, system update, mail, process viewer etc.

I do use bittorrent, and a crash is almost guaranteed if I use any other program along with it, and a guaranteed crash within 1 minute using Safari simultaneously.

Has anyone heard Apple specifically address this problem and say that they are taking it seriously? I would hope that they have been workng on it, yet it would be nice to hear it from them to put my mind to rest.

Link · Apr 6, 2004, 03:52 PM

The other day I had a REALLY crappy morning. Sunday I believe it was.

I came down to check stuff out. Oh great, internet connection resynced and dropped my modem.

I reset it, get back everything online, start some music and check a webpage

*comp stops responding* @#$*()&^#$

Restart, wait about 2 minutes, it boots up again, do the **** to get my pro speakers working, put up some music and open browser window.. BAM!

Lather, rinse repeat?

BAM!

And BAM! again....

The funny thing is only 2 of them were speaker crash-freezes.

*shrug* that prospeaker sound driver is a piece of @$#&*

TheTraveller · Apr 7, 2004, 02:32 AM

Since I've stopped using acqlite or Bittorrent or Limewire a week or so ago, I haven't had a single incident. I did install the Security Update earlier today.

Harry Schaefer · Apr 8, 2004, 12:52 AM

"For trouble free operation I recommend ....

Macaroni ... just set it and forget it.
Cache Out X
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9538"

What a great couple of suggestions. Reading this thread I immediately installed this software. Thanks for the very helpful ideas.

Harry

kampl · Apr 8, 2004, 08:46 PM

Welp, I guess this is not software related for me. I was able to cob together a franken-powerbook (Ti800) from two mediocre functioning books and kaboom, perfection (save for Apple Mail junk filtering still being broken, for another thread....). I believe my problem is related to the logic board. Stole my drives, Airport and RAM from one book, dropped them in another and all is well. Good luck to you all. Fare thee well........

parkds · Apr 9, 2004, 12:20 AM

I have been having this problem since upgrade to panther also. Itunes is always playing when it occurs. I will be doing something on my computer while music is playing and suddenly everything locks up except the mouse. The only solution is to do a hard restart of the computer. Besides the frustration of doing the restart and losing whatever I was working on, this is very annoying because it corrupts my iTunes library usually.

macintologist · Apr 9, 2004, 05:01 PM

I can confirm that disabling CRASHREPORTER has solved the crashing problem.

My problem was related directly to Airport. My iMac served as an airport base station and I could easily instigate a complete crash on the iMac but doing some heavy network traffic like file transfer. After disabling crashreporter I have transfered gigs of data back and forth and no crashing. Thanks guys!

ender2002 · Apr 11, 2004, 08:33 PM

One solution to the problem is to wait it out. For instance: One time my computer locked up with photoshop and itunes and safari, bittorrent, acquisition, and textedit. I had a really important (and unsaved) photoshop file and I didn't want to lose it. I turned off the monitor and waited for 4-5 minutes and BOOM. iTunes started cranking out music and it was all back to normal.

Try it.

nforcer · Apr 12, 2004, 12:32 AM

Originally posted by ender2002:
One solution to the problem is to wait it out. For instance: One time my computer locked up with photoshop and itunes and safari, bittorrent, acquisition, and textedit. I had a really important (and unsaved) photoshop file and I didn't want to lose it. I turned off the monitor and waited for 4-5 minutes and BOOM. iTunes started cranking out music and it was all back to normal.

Try it.

This is true. Sometimes it does unfreeze (happened to me twice, IIRC). I usually give it 5 to 10 minutes to unfreeze before I kill the power and start up again. Most of the time, it's just not practical to wait it out unless you are really desperate to get unsaved work back.

jokell82 · Apr 12, 2004, 01:01 AM

Originally posted by nforcer:
This is true. Sometimes it does unfreeze (happened to me twice, IIRC). I usually give it 5 to 10 minutes to unfreeze before I kill the power and start up again. Most of the time, it's just not practical to wait it out unless you are really desperate to get unsaved work back.

If you have a notebook, I find that often unplugging it (putting it on battery power) can jolt it back to working. And if that doesn't work, sometimes taking the battery out while plugged in can do it.

I tend to get the "freezes" one to two times per day. Usually the only software running will be Safari, Mail, NetNewsWire, and Adium. All over airport. I've been able to wait out almost all of the freezes, only restarting once or twice since they began (a long ass time ago).

Zim · Apr 12, 2004, 10:33 AM

Originally posted by stux:
Just got my usual panther freeze

(this is the one where the mouse goes jerky, and itunes pauses and then plays a few notes, then pauses, but the entire machine is locked up. And eventually the mouse will stop moving too)

Pings were responding, ssh couldn't be opened

I had disabled crashreporterd after the last 'event', so now I can say that disabling crashreporterd made no difference.

I was playing an iTunes song at the time, BT was downloading a single torrent at 54K/s, and I was compiling a large project in CodeWarrior.

So this translates to relatively heavy load.

(It is not actually related to any of these apps as I have had the same issue when all or none of them were running. I just think the problem is caused or exacerbated by actual heavy use (it works fine if you don't do anything )

It often freezes when BT is doing something heavy... like checking 3 multi-gig torrents... or when compiling...

I do have a couple of FW disks connected (Oxford 911 and 922 chipsets), but they were not being actively used.

Right on schedule... its been about 2 weeks since the last one.

(10.3.0, 10.3.1, 10.3.2, 10.3.3, does not make a difference)

My experience is very similar to yours, but since diabling CrashReporter I have not had the hang (knock wood). This has been happening to me since 10.3.0 (never on 10.2.x), and I reported it to Apple in late Nov 2003. I am not optimistic that they are doing anything about this, and have had no further queries from them since early December. I have tried to "wait it out", but gave up once after 15 minutes.

Mike

Big Mac · Apr 12, 2004, 04:27 PM

Many of the symptoms in this thread (erratic pointer movement followed by freeze and then unfreeze several minutes later) sound eerily like the PPP bug. Unfortunately, we all know how frightfully long it took Apple to resolve that issue - they only fixed it after an enterprising independent developer released his own fix. I have yet to experience this issue, but then again I don't have iTunes on that often. Has anyone attempted to use an older version of iTunes 4 to see whether or not one of the recent incremental iTunes updates is at fault?

jokell82 · Apr 13, 2004, 04:42 PM

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Many of the symptoms in this thread (erratic pointer movement followed by freeze and then unfreeze several minutes later) sound eerily like the PPP bug. Unfortunately, we all know how frightfully long it took Apple to resolve that issue - they only fixed it after an enterprising independent developer released his own fix. I have yet to experience this issue, but then again I don't have iTunes on that often. Has anyone attempted to use an older version of iTunes 4 to see whether or not one of the recent incremental iTunes updates is at fault?

I get it without iTunes running at all...

Zim · 09:44 AM

Originally posted by jokell82:
I get it without iTunes running at all...

Same for me. In my 15-20 experiences of this hang (since 10.3.0), iTunes was never open.

I suspect that some(many?) people use iTunes alot, so its like saying "my monitor was on".

All it takes for me is 2 network apps running at the same time. BitTorrent, and trn (threaded news reader). Never with just one. 2 unix-based apps taking down unix.. not s'posed to happen (daily unix-user since 1988)

Mike

The Placid Casual · Apr 15, 2004, 08:38 AM

Well, I have been running my new 1.8 Dual G5 for about a week now. No problems.

This morning I used the fatal combination of iTunes, Acquisition, and Safari.

Boom.

4 crashes in the last 2 hours.

Screen freezes. Occasional bursts of music. Can't SSH to the box.

Only way to escape is a hard reboot.

I think it is linked to iTunes and heavy network activity as that's what I've been doing every time it has locked up.