Help!
My boss is threatening to ditch OS X and go back to OS 9 - siting the fact that nothing works properly and that it is painfully slow.
I'm a big fan of OS X, but I must agree that there are still a lot of things that just don't work as expected. I also got a bit of a shock when I went back to an old Yikes! G4 running OS 9 - it was blindingly fast!
Perhaps more worrying was his threat of canceling the order for my new G5 and getting me a PC instead...
I'm a big fan of OS X, but I must agree that there are still a lot of things that just don't work as expected. I also got a bit of a shock when I went back to an old Yikes! G4 running OS 9 - it was blindingly fast!
Perhaps more worrying was his threat of canceling the order for my new G5 and getting me a PC instead...
Comments
"Painfully slow"? What kind of machines are you running? With recent machines, I'd think any loss of OS snappiness would be outweighed by the other positive things OSX does.
How about some details? BTW, no way in hell is OSX going to be painfully slow on a G5!
Anyways what is it that does not work properly that should?
Tell your boss to walk in the Apple Store and run a test on G5
What exactly are you doing with the computer and what are its specs?
Originally posted by Messiah
My boss is threatening to ditch OS X and go back to OS 9 - siting the fact that nothing works properly and that it is painfully slow.
Panther should address the painfully slow problem - if the problem isn't pre-USB G3s with 128MB RAM, anyway.
As for the rest, well, where to begin? I can't blame your boss for wanting to use tools that work, so what's broken? There's nothing anyone can offer in the way of help from so general a description; selling OS X on some sort of abstract theoretical merit will get you ten kinds of nowhere.
Perhaps more worrying was his threat of canceling the order for my new G5 and getting me a PC instead...
Now that's just silly. But again, without knowing what the problem is, it's not easy to argue against.
I'm going to move this to Genius Bar, on the assumption that you actually want help with things that aren't working, or that aren't working well enough.
SLUGGISH:
I running 10.2.6 on a 450MHz Cube with 1280MB of RAM and it's very slow (to the point where you type stuff in and it takes about 5 seconds for the display to update).
He's running 10.2.6 on an 800MHz Quicksilver, with 1024MB of RAM.
We both use Photoshop 7. He uses Freehand, and I use InDesign and Illustrator. There is def. a big difference when running these apps in OS X and OS 9 (perhaps with the exception of InDesign which drags its arse across the floor regardless of what its running on).
ATTITUDE:
I think the problem is that my boss is just itching to switch to PCs because of the difference in price. Yeah I know, I know! But at the end of the day he's only interested in the price.
Everytime we experience an 'OS X' problem [pretty much everything gets be blamed on OS X] it's another reason to switch to PCs.
PRINT:
We're getting some really weird printing problems. Sometimes the job just disappears. It'll go through all the actions in the app, but won't make it to the Print Centre.
On one occassion, we printed an e-mail, and within seconds decided that we wanted a second copy. Command-P resulted in the printer producing a second copy, but the fontt size had changed dramatically. We hadn't changed a single thing.
The only way my boss can get anything to print correctly is be restarting his machine after every page.
I'm always getting postscript errors. I've updated the firmware and the drivers and we still get the same problems.
NETWORKING:
The OS 9 machines can't login into any of the OS X machines. Believe me we've tried everything we can think of, but at the end of the day we have jobs to do and bills to pay and we don't have time to fanny around.
We're about to move premises, so we'll be able to start over.
I guess I'm looking for help on any of the above. If I can solve the problems then maybe I'll be able to restore his faith in OS X. I don't think I can do anything about the speed issues.
Originally posted by murbot
I find your username highly offensive.
Don't! Everytime I read that my stomach drops about three feet!
What kind of storage are you working with size/number of disks/speed.
ATTITUDE:
At least you haven't spent the last week patching flaky security on your core machines (as you would have been with a pc).
has your boss done any real world pc comparisons or is this a "grass is always greener" mentality?
PRINT & NETWORKING:
Not something i know a great deal about on a mac so i'll leave this to someone else
Originally posted by gardnerj
SLUGGISH:
What kind of storage are you working with size/number of disks/speed.
ATTITUDE:
At least you haven't spent the last week patching flaky security on your core machines (as you would have been with a pc).
has your boss done any real world pc comparisons or is this a "grass is always greener" mentality?
PRINT & NETWORKING:
Not something i know a great deal about on a mac so i'll leave this to someone else
We're both running single 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9, 7200rpm drives which I installed myself.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with "the grass is always greener". The security issues are also a good point! I might just pull them out the hat during the next spat...
Thanks!
Originally posted by Messiah
Cheers for the replies guys!
NETWORKING:
The OS 9 machines can't login into any of the OS X machines. Believe me we've tried everything we can think of, but at the end of the day we have jobs to do and bills to pay and we don't have time to fanny around.
Does any of the networking have AppleTalk turned on? If so, are the computers plugged into a switch and not a hub? Seems that Macs that try to automatically assign an AppleTalk address all default 65280.128 so there may be conflicts. Try manually assigning AppleTalk addresses.
Originally posted by Messiah
Cheers for the replies guys!
SLUGGISH:
I running 10.2.6 on a 450MHz Cube with 1280MB of RAM and it's very slow (to the point where you type stuff in and it takes about 5 seconds for the display to update).
In what application? I have 10.2.6 installed on a 450MHz Cube with 1GB RAM and I can have the Gimp building in Terminal while iTunes does its thing and Canvas renders an image, and I don't get 5 second delays doing anything (although nothing is exactly Snappy(TM) at that point).
PS 7 and Ill 10 both have serious performance issues in OS X, largely due to Adobe; but if you're trying to get work done in them then that's a serious concern. I've heard that Word has issues keeping up with a good typist. Have you done a permissions fix, or tried trashing preferences? Hosed disk permissions (a persistent OS X problem, especially after installs) and corrupted preferences (a classic Mac issue) can both hobble performance.
Also, I've heard that PS 8 will significantly improve performance, and Panther definitely will. The G5 certainly will.