Problembs With X

The only times I find that apps freeze or take forever when they quit is when I quit Mail or IE when my internet connection is down. Then they hang forever and I have to force quit them. Other than that, my time will randomly rest to 1969!!

Everything else is wonderful!

-Pete

NETWORKING!!!! I could write a post as long as Spikey or joey on this one. But for ease, check out the postings in apples discussion site under Networking. THere are hundreds of issuse and no good answers (or at least easy ones without having to buy third party software)

Emptying the trash sometimes does some weird things like not being able to delete files becasue of permissions or becasue they are in use (even if you have permission and they are not in use)

Disapearing mouse

Menus disappearing in classic programs

Mystery hangs on websites requiring force quits, that don't happen in classic explorer (more of an OSX explorer problem than OSX itself I suspect)

Opening iMovie form the file rather than the alias will create a second iMovie alias in the dock

Camera won't connect if iMovie is on before the cameras is turned on (a quick eject of the tape solves this)

In programs that hide the dock if you inadvertantly wake the dock up, sometimes the windows do not redraw.

Windows in classic sometimes make errors in the redrawing of the desktop paterns.

have a powerbook 2001 Ti550.

its running mac os 10.1.1 and speech ont work. period.

speech just refuses to recognise any of the speech commands or anything speech related.

can anyone help ?

re: networking

as bad as some people could complain about mac networking, the pc world has awful issues too and that is why

1) there are still jobs for networking types putting out fires

2) the networking revolution never took off in 1999 as expected because we are so busy putting out the fires we already have caused with networking in the first place

bad networking problems are always to be expected, at least in this still infant time of hardwire networking and still experimental, embryonic wireless networking (of which a standard still is not agreed upon)

you want to see networking issues, try windows NT 4.0 and device drivers...you could spend the rest of your life on this topic alone

who needs to worry about people stealing files as the number one issue when networking casuses more lost data than anything else? moving 0's and 1's at high speed across tangled cables and through the air is a risky proposition at best

[Edited by jefhatfield on 11-26-2001 at 11:35 AM]

RAM?

Problems closing files could very well be a RAM issue, or lack of RAM issue. How much memory do you have on the systems having problems? OS X is a little more memory intensive and you should have 256MB or more, I have 384MB on my Powerbook OC 500 and it's barely enough. UNIX (BSD based in this case) has very good memory management from the application side which usually equates to presentation annoyances. If you have a small amount of memory the kernel will page unused applications to virtual memory (disk drive). Virtual memory takes much longer to access than does real memory. Lets say, for example, you open IE wander around the 'net for a few minutes minimize it and open, say, Photoshop. Photoshop is very memory intensive and you also open a large file within Photoshop. You have now run out of memory so the kernel will page some applications out, since IE is minimized it's a very good candidate. Now, you open up an IE screen and hit quit. The kernel needs to load IE back into real memory while also paging something else out to virtual memory and IDE/ATA drives are unidirectional so you've just clogged up the virtual memory pipeline. Add to this emptying your trash, searching for a file, streaming A/V, etc... and your system grinds to a halt. Increase your memory 512MB+ and you won't be paging stuff to virtual memory which, theoretically, speeds your system up.

There are a couple of other tricks you can/should do for better memory usage. Creating a separate swap partition reduces fragmentation, better yet, put it on a separate drive than your main system drive. Upgrade to SCSI, don't use firewire/USB drives for swap.

My guess is this is causing a lot of headaches for most people switching to OS X.

RAM ISSUES

i have been hearing so much about how os x takes a lot of RAM that it must be true for a lot of people on their macs

apple then should have written the appropriate amount of how much RAM would be needed to run os x practically

on the pc side, microsoft always puts such a woefully low min system requirements for their software that i have to often double the amount of RAM to get a real min system satisfaction...and games often cite low min stats, too

...i guess it is to sell the software to as many people as possible

Hmmm...

That should be enough RAM unless you're running a lot of applications and/or have very large files open (like movies or large pictures). One thing you can try when this happens is to open a terminal (or keep one open all the time) and run top. Just type top at the terminal screen, this will show the processes running on your system. Look for the application that's hanging on close and see what the CPU utilization is (represented as a percentage). If there's another application that's very high then that's what's causing your problem. Sometimes, for whatever reason (usually bad programming), an application goes into an infinate loop and sends CPU usage to near 100% (in Unix an application can't take 100% of the CPU but it can take a very high percentage thereby slowing down everything else). Another issue may be flaky hardware try to get your hands on some hardware testing utilities and see if it finds anything. A 600MHz G3 should not, normally, hang on closing apps. Also, make sure you upgrade to 10.1.1 which fixed a few bugs here and there.

Good Luck

common bug?

i have run into this one on a few different systems now...
in 10.1 after a long jam of itunes visualizer (full screen) when you switch out of the visualizer your cursor is invisible. log out & back in fixes.

Good point about the cursor in OS X. When all of the rest of the GUI is beautifully antialiased, the cursor hasn't changed in decades. Even Windows 2000 managed to add a soft drop-shadow to their larger cursor.

I think it's a performance issue - the cursor is not drawn by the Quartz graphics engine, it's handled by something at a much lower level - maybe hard coded into the machines ROM. If it was drawn by Quartz it would become unresponsive as the system slows down, which most users would find unacceptable. Also, Mac users are used to the cursor appearing before the OS has loaded - which would be impossible unless it's handled at a very low level. These things are probably hardware issues.

On the subject of ROM/BIOS/hardware, I wonder if Apple will update all of these when OS X becomes the default OS. Could we finally rid ourselves of the "Happy Mac" icon at start up and change if for an beautiful white Apple silhouette on a black background - more in the style of a Sony Viao. Surely the happy mac is now past its sell-by date. They could also add a more Aqua style, larger cursor icon at the same time, which would make old hardware running OS X look kinda dated don't you think?