[geeks] Breaking OS X (was: Weird MacOS issue)

[Mark Benson]

On 23 Dec 2008, at 23:19, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> If it's not your fault, and the system fails despite treating the OS  
> so
> gingerly, that would seem to indicate that the failures are induced
> randomly, and that you can't do much, if anything, to prevent them.

I beg to differ, they were all well known problems at the time.  
Remember the old 'blue screen of death' issue that hit some older G3 &  
G4 owners in 10.3.x (It think it was 10.3,x, I forget now)? It got me  
and thousands of others. I'd hardly call that random, it was a class A  
screw up on Apple's part. You were lucky to dodge that one to be  
honest if you were still running that B&W, you'd probably moved on by  
then though, I know it didn't effect my (then new-ish) iMac G4.

10.4 died on my iMac G4 after a system update.

10.4 went down and wouldn't return on my Mac Pro too.

Luckily for my constitution, an archive and install in the first 2  
cases brought the machines back up but it's time wasted on stuff  
people should get right. In the third case I had to mount the hard  
drive on my iMac via Firewire target disk to even convince it that it  
was bootable, and it recovered from there.

Apple meanwhile swear blind it's the user's fault, and you should  
always jump through hoop A then B. That includes closing everything  
before doing an update and also rebooting when asked to at the end. I  
tend to do as I'm told so at least then I can confidently swear at  
Apple with a clear conscience, if nothing else ;)

YMMV, and obviously YMDV, but like I say, I was bought up with a  
healthy sense of paranoia when it came to installing stuff that dates  
back to the days when following instructions actually mattered.

But do you know hat ticks me off, above all else? My Mac Pro works  
flawlessly in Vista, and really damned well. The graphics drivers are  
excellent and never even bat an eyelid, The computer is fast, probably  
slightly more so than Leopard, and I've not had a problem with any  
Windows updates in just shy of a year. Admittedly I use Vista mostly  
for games but I still surf, check my mail and do some light image work  
in Paint.NET while I'm there.

That says to me that Apple have a good ways to go before they can even  
begin to believe they've 'fully adopted' x86 hardware.

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>

"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."