does OS X freeze like windows?

future-ex-pc-user · April 27, 2003 9:14AM

Does mac os x freeze like its quite common on windows machines? I'm asking this because I like to have lots of applications open at the same time (around 5 to 10 plus some webpages) on win xp pro. Since I haven't got the most recent pc (466MHz + 320MB RAM) the system starts to freeze quite often (the mouse wont move; music stops etc), but this also happens on better pcs (but less often).

I'm thinking about buying a powerbook soon, so I wanted to know if the hole system can also freeze, or will it be always responsive?

Another question: What are kernel panics? are this apples blue-screens-of-death??

ast3r3x · April 27, 2003 9:48AM

Quote:

Originally posted by future-ex-pc-user

Does mac os x freeze like its quite common on windows machines? I'm asking this because I like to have lots of applications open at the same time (around 5 to 10 plus some webpages) on win xp pro. Since I haven't got the most recent pc (466MHz + 320MB RAM) the system starts to freeze quite often (the mouse wont move; music stops etc), but this also happens on better pcs (but less often).

I'm thinking about buying a powerbook soon, so I wanted to know if the hole system can also freeze, or will it be always responsive?

Another question: What are kernel panics? are this apples blue-screens-of-death??

no, OS X doesn't freeze, well it does but barely ever...fact is you might think it doesn't because it wont' ever freeze on you. OS X (unix base) is stable as $***. Kernal panics don't happen often either, its normally if you mess with some of the systems workings or add unsupported hardware. I copied my entire system from one drive to another and started to have panics but i belive it was because of the harddrive had problems. So after running norton utilities, everythign wsa back to normal.

so in general, unless you f*** aroudn with your system, you will wonder why people would ever use an OS such as windows

(XP has been very stable for me on a 600MHz P3 with 128MB Ram) Do you have service pack 1, because that fixed a memory leaking issue that caused XP to freeze

jbl · April 27, 2003 9:50AM

Yes kernel panics are OSX's blue screen of death. I haven't had one for over a year.

It is possible to freeze the system, although (for me) this doesn't happen very often. One way to do this is to fill up your hard disk. OSX just dies if there is not enough space to save the virtual memory swap file. Maybe this is fixed in 10.2.5? I also managed to do this when I was attempting to write a full screen application (sort of a game). It (my program) crashed, and I didn't have any way to get to any of the other applications.

I think it is safe to say this will not happen to you often.

fryke · April 27, 2003 9:54AM

The responsiveness of the system does _not_ go down if you open more apps. Mac OS X handles that quite gracefully. However, if you start to switch between all of the open apps very, very fast, you'll notice that there'll be quite a bit of harddrive/memory swapping.

I usually have about 15 apps open on my little iBook/800 with 640 MB RAM (RAM helps with this, get as much as you can, but don't buy it from Apple because of the price difference), and am working with two or three apps at the same time (not counting the Mail.app which fetches my mail in the background and Safari which has about 8 pages open simultaneously) without a problem.

rampancy · April 27, 2003 10:00AM

When you get your new Mac, get as much RAM as you can afford (or as much as your Mac can handle). If there is one thing that will overall make your machine with X and multiple apps run more smoothly, it will be more RAM.

dhagan4755 · April 27, 2003 3:02PM

Kernic panic are very much the exception and not the rule. I saw my second k.p. recently on my PB 867 and that's in three years of using Mac OS X since the public beta.

I think a lot of your problems with Win XP Pro may be the result of slow hardware. I had a Dell 4300 awhile back and it never froze like ME did. It was actually almost as good as the Mac as far as stability goes...I can remember restarting it a couple of times because XP Home did crash.

overhope · April 27, 2003 3:22PM

Just this afternoon I was streaming Internet audio, reading about a dozen web pages in two different browsers, writing and testing HTML, running an FTP client, doing some 3D modelling, reformatting some graphics and letting Mail do its thing on the half hour all at the same time with no problems.

I've seen precisely one kernel panic across two machines in the last 10 months or so, during which my Windows machine has completely futzed itself more often than I care to remember.

X is a nice OS.

spart · April 27, 2003 4:38PM

Never had a single crash or KP, been running X for almost two years.

Don't worry about having lots of apps open.

stunned · April 27, 2003 8:43PM

Well, I had my iBook for a year and expereinced about 5 crashes, seemingly for no reason. But it never got too bad.

My advice is to add more ram. The more the merrier.

not unlike myself · April 27, 2003 8:51PM

I too have never had a single KP, (which now that I think about it seems very odd). I once unplugged the mac while it was on but that's the closest I've ever come to crashing it. A simple boot up later things were right as rain.

On the other hand my XP machine crashes no less then once a week. HARD crashed (requires power button restart). It has software crashes about every other day. (fatal errors)

bauman · April 27, 2003 9:05PM

In my experience, XP boxes don't really 'crash' or 'freeze' per se, but they do get messed up about once a week. Things just start behaving badly (poor drawing of screens, some webpages don't load, moving widows around just covers the screen with the drawing of the window, and general crap), and a restart fixes it. In fact, if I don't restart about once a day, things go messy.

Not so in OS X. You'll get application crashes (like in XP), but the entire system is much more stable. If you have more applications open than your RAM can handle, some of it gets swapped to virtual memory on the HD, and moving that back into RAM can really slow things down. That's when you get the dreaded 'Beach Ball o' Death,' but just give it a bit, and it sorts itself out.

Kernel panics are like the Blue Screen o' Death, but nicer looking. They just say that 'you need to restart your computer now' in nine different languages.

mount_my_floppy · April 27, 2003 9:13PM

Okay I didn`t read through the entire thread but I wanna get one thing straight here on the kernel panic front. If some one else posted this already then my bad..

OS X runs on whats called the mach kernel. A kernel is what controls the OS (in lamens terms) Your GUI and Apps talk to the kernel and the kernel talks to the OS, basicly.

(Windows XP runs on the windows NT kernel)

Unix has whats called a kernel panic, it can be refered to as the unix blue screen of death but its really more than that. A kernel panic is a faliure of the kernel at a low level. A miscommunication really. Apple created a way so the kernel panic looks more "Sexy" than the traditional way of displaying them..

So are kernel panics the the OS X blue screen of death? Technically no.. But you *could* look at it that way.

ahbo · April 27, 2003 10:48PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mount_my_floppy

Your GUI and Apps talk to the kernel and the kernel talks to the OS, basicly.

(Windows XP runs on the windows NT kernel) [/B]

Small point, but I would say that the kernel is the heart of the OS, such that your applications talk to the various components of the OS, and the kernel is the bridge between OS components and between the OS and hardware.

rick1138 · April 27, 2003 11:46PM

There is also the firmware level, which mediates between hardware and software, called the BIOS on PCs. The kernel proper is theoretically hardware independent, wheras the firmware is hardware dependent.

overhope · April 28, 2003 4:38AM

Anyway, kernel panics aren't purely an OS X thing: they've existed in Unix since the year dot.

It's not so much a crash as Unix saying "something weird has happened that I don't know how to deal with, so let's just start from scratch, okay?", and telling the GUI to pop the nice message on the screen so you can hit the button.

fryke · April 28, 2003 5:01AM

However, you've just described a crash.

robster · April 28, 2003 7:34AM

no it doesnt

costique · April 28, 2003 8:03AM

Quote:

Originally posted by robster

no it doesnt

Visit Apple discussion boards. After looking through them one might think that OS X is the least stable OS ever. However, I haven't had a single kernel panic and only one hard freeze back in some 2001 since 10.0.

I used to do some Mac tech support in the past and I can say that people do miracles. They do things you couldn't imagine or dream about every day, screwing up software, hardware, data and one another. Another thing is tech-savvy people, which may not know how to do something, but know what they must not do.

You can freeze almost any OS provided you have appropriate peripherals with buggy drivers. You can break any OS with hacked-up untested system modificators. You can lose any data if you never back it up.

Just think before you act and OS X will be as solid for you as no Windows have ever been.

ast3r3x · April 28, 2003 8:10AM

i've had two different types of crashes/panics in OS X

one was everything got grayed out and in differetn languages it told me to restart

the other one i got was white text with a black background coming over the screen telling me it was waiting for a remote debugger

jbl · April 28, 2003 11:30AM

Quote:

Originally posted by ast3r3x

i've had two different types of crashes/panics in OS X

one was everything got grayed out and in differetn languages it told me to restart

the other one i got was white text with a black background coming over the screen telling me it was waiting for a remote debugger

The first one is the new style kernel panic the second one is the old style. I think it switched in 10.2.

mount_my_floppy · April 28, 2003 2:40PM

Quote:

've had two different types of crashes/panics in OS X

one was everything got grayed out and in differetn languages it told me to restart

the other one i got was white text with a black background coming over the screen telling me it was waiting for a remote debugger

The first one is what a real unix kernel panic looks like. You got this while running > 10.2.0 Anything after that has a nice styled interface attacked to the Kernel panic..

does OS X freeze like windows?

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