About OS X crashes

pbpb
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I have not yet installed Panther and I would like to hear from people that already did it. In Jaguar, the only applications able to take the computer down to the point you need to force a restart, are, for me anyway:



(1) Omniweb 4.5



(2) Finder .



What are your experience from Panther? Has the Finder been fixed or is it still able to crash hard the computer while networking? Are there other applications crashing badly under Panther (I mean taking down the whole system and hammering unmercifully the hard drive during crash, maddening fsck at startup)?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 18
    OmniWeb? How bizarre. That's one app that has never acted badly for me and it's the last app that should be locking your whole machine. Have you tried trashing the preferences/support files for it before?



    I have yet to have any app hang the machine so badly in 10.3 to necessitate a reboot. Of course, that was a very rare occurrence in 10.2 as well. Force-quitting the Finder or taking a full log out would happen from time to time, but not a reboot.
  • Reply 2 of 18
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    OmniWeb? How bizarre. That's one app that has never acted badly for me and it's the last app that should be locking your whole machine.



    Not only that, but even escapepod was unable to log me out! And when I cmd-s-restarted to run fsck after that, the first run reported "Unable to repair the disk" (cold sweat here). Subsequent fsck runs fortunately corrected the disk problems. By the way, I have until now only one Omniweb incident and only with v4.5. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing for the Finder.
  • Reply 3 of 18
    I have had no problems with panther. It's a big improvement over jaguar which i had the finder hang every now and then. Go ahead get it installed, it's the only way your going to find out whether its better for you.



    The only draw back i have is that deleting folders/files takes slightly longer to disapear but otherwise its a great update.
  • Reply 4 of 18
    Yikes. It sounds like you've got bigger problems that just the occasional app hanging, PB. That really shouldn't be happening. Have you tried any clean reinstalls lately? I think for you it would be worth the effort when you get Panther to take care of any niggling problems you don't see immediately.
  • Reply 5 of 18
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    Have you tried any clean reinstalls lately?



    No, you know, there is this over 2 GB fink /sw directory... I don't want to recompile all that stuff.



    Quote:

    I think for you it would be worth the effort when you get Panther to take care of any niggling problems you don't see immediately.



    That's for sure.
  • Reply 6 of 18
    relicrelic Posts: 4,735member
    I really like OSX for its UNIX underpins, its glossy window manager, shortcut keys, organization of files, ease of use and its cool factor. However I still find it barely on par with other UNIX OS?s in terms of stability. Sure the OS doesn't crash but who cares when the Apps do taking your work with it. I?m sure it has everything to do with the archaic classic legacy crap, here?s hoping Apple will dump it sooner then later. Plus OSX is far from what I would call fast. Surfing is extremely unsatisfactory, FTP, if it works, is pretty mediocre, heck networking in general falls short, window resizing is horrible, blah blah blah blah. I?m sure no one wants to here this, but I really have to know, does anyone else feel this way? I work predominantly in a Solaris atmosphere and I sure was hoping OSX could fill in that empty void called a Desktop. CDE is extremely bad for anything that resembles organization. I?ll keep trying to make OSX work for me but FreeBSD is starting to look better and better.



    Long live Xterm.....
  • Reply 7 of 18
    Other than the filevault problems I had the first couple days, everything else is solid. More importantly, I can mount multiple SMB shares simultaneously without issue (previously this would call the Col. and he would rudely insert himself into my life
  • Reply 8 of 18
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Relic

    ...OSX is far from what I would call fast. Surfing is extremely unsatisfactory, FTP, if it works, is pretty mediocre, heck networking in general falls short, window resizing is horrible...



    Hmm.. I do not think OS X is slow anymore.



    Cheetah sucked.. but it was pretty.

    Puma was below average.. but much much better than Cheetah.

    Jaguar was average I would say.

    Panther is just right (fast).



    Although the improvement over Jaguar is only slightly, it's enough to bring Panther up to speed with Windows. In Panther, the UI is still slightly less responsive than Windows NT on the P4 at work.. but it's very close:



    Menus drop down as quickly

    dialog boxes are as fast

    Minimizing windows to the dock is as fast

    moving files is a bit slower

    window resizing is not even close.



    My computer is a 1.42GHz DP w/2GB memory, though.. it's on the top end of the G4's so that definitely makes a difference, but Panther is also pretty responsive on my iBook.. again it is quite comparable to Windows. In terms of UI responsiveness of course.
  • Reply 9 of 18
    ipeonipeon Posts: 1,122member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by cybermonkey

    The only draw back i have is that deleting folders/files takes slightly longer to disapear but otherwise its a great update.



    With me it's the opposite.



    Panther is definitely faster than Jaguar. Everything feels snappier finder wise. YES! On my G4 350 Panther is very close to OS 9's responsiveness. Have had no problems with it. Expose rules.
  • Reply 10 of 18
    I've had some finder oddness from time to time but no significant instability. I'm still unable to connect to my fiancee's w2k machine from the finder (I'm almost positive it's something on THAT computer causing the problem but I'm not sure). Other than that, I'd definitely do the upgrade. It's worth it and will only get better.
  • Reply 11 of 18
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by pensieve

    I'm still unable to connect to my fiancee's w2k machine from the finder (I'm almost positive it's something on THAT computer causing the problem but I'm not sure).



    Broken SAMBA in Panther perhaps? Can anyone confirm?
  • Reply 12 of 18
    bigsbigs Posts: 12member
    The Finder in Jaguar used to drive me crazy sometimes (especially when I had one or more SMB connections open). I've been using Panther since the release and haven't had the Finder crash on me ONCE. Of course your mileage may very, but I'm pretty happy with it.
  • Reply 13 of 18
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Bigs

    The Finder in Jaguar used to drive me crazy sometimes (especially when I had one or more SMB connections open). I've been using Panther since the release and haven't had the Finder crash on me ONCE. Of course your mileage may very, but I'm pretty happy with it.



    Never had a finder crash, I've had Safari, iChat, Mail, iMovie, FCP, iTunes...to name a few. But app crashes are few and far between. I've only had about 4 Kernal panics since I started using X.
  • Reply 14 of 18
    In general I've found Panther to be faaar more buggy than Jag.



    The entire year I used Jaguar I only had to reboot the machine once because of a lock up, but I've probably had to 6 or 7 times allready with Panther. Sometimes apps just freeze up, and then when I try to force quit them they take the Finder down with them, and after that theres really nothing I can do.
  • Reply 15 of 18
    In the light of this thread and several others where people have complained about stability/problems/etc with 10.3, I feel compelled to add my experience.



    Since Panther has gone GM, my computer has not crashed or hard locked up once. The only times I've rebooted were due to the system software updates.



    All of my software has worked fine. The only Safari problems I had were due to a new beta version of PithHelmet. I removed that and grabbed the updated version and everything was peachy again. Camino crashed on startup because I was using an old build. I updated that and, again, no more problems.



    I have found one reproducible crash in the Finder, but it is one that most users would never encounter. I have fired off a bug report to Apple about it. Other than that, totally stable. Yes, there are problems with networked Windows workgroups, but they doesn't crash or hang the Finder.



    iChat AV is markedly more stable now in 10.3 than the old iChat in 10.2.



    Like I said, everything works fine here. I put in countless hours on this machine. I do the usual web surfing and e-maling, I do graphics work with tools like Image Capture and GC and Photoshop and FCP, I write code with SubEthaEdit and TextEdit and Xcode, I compile and run other apps via Terminal, I listen to music in iTunes, I watch videos in QTP and VLC and MPlayer, I remotely access through SSH and VNC, I serve pages with Apache and PHP and SQL, I play the occasional game of Pop-pop or Snood or Enigmo or RtCW or Ghost Recon...



    I can't remember the last time I had a noteworthy problem!
  • Reply 16 of 18
    ..The prob with Omniweb.. I used to have the same prob, it would bring the whole system down (under 10.2.x) and escapepod didnt seem to do anything... *sometimes* I think app crashes might muck up a timing thing somewhere because I found that unplugging the usb keyboard and mouse and then reconnecting would give me back functionality... of course I use safari now so the problem is solved for me anyway
  • Reply 17 of 18
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by gsxrboy

    ... *sometimes* I think app crashes might muck up a timing thing somewhere because I found that unplugging the usb keyboard and mouse and then reconnecting would give me back functionality...



    In my case, it seems that the system hang-up occured since Omniweb suffocated the hard drive; fsck reported some crazy repairs after that. This explains(?) also why escapepod was unable to do anything. Certainly not a system crash in the strict sense, but in practice it makes little or no difference.
  • Reply 18 of 18
    placeboplacebo Posts: 5,767member
    So solid it's unbelievable. Word has been giving me some crashes lately; like one unexpected quit a week. Not lock ups, though.



    I opened all the PDFs on my hard drive, and it didn't crash. It sure damn took a little while, but...
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