Post here with your worst Mac experience/problem

sometimes when i'm playing witht he brightness setting, the thing slowed down severely and the brightness control is non-responsive - the control is delayed (badly) and slows the whole thing down. i don't get how brightness can affect the entire system, but it sometimes does.

sometimes i takes a log out and back in before the thing's fixed. and very rarely, an app would quit unexpectedly. lucky most of the time it was just camino, but imagine if it were a huge project. granted camino is still 0.8, but it's still disturbing.

ow and yesterday in the middle of slight slowdown, it somehow logged out on its own. no warning, nothing. it just jumped to the lgin window and all my apps were closed as if i just logged out.

Well... the day I bought my 17" PB the headphone jack had one of the contacts bent... I use the powerbook so much though I never get the chance to mail it in and have it fixed. So pretty much my headphone jack doesn't work correctly.

The rubber feet have also come off.... other than that, everything is peachy.

It's not so much a problem, but I just wish my old USB Logitech Quickcam would work with iChat. I'd like an iSight, but $150 is $50 more than I'd like to spend on a simple webcam.

The only problem I have with my mac is the hinge on the screen. Every time i move it after its been sitting for a while there is a loud crack and it is stiff to move for a second or so. If i move it continuously through its full motion it goes away eventually.

Very annoying

My worst technical problem was a dead logic board in my G3 iBook. Nothing special.

My worst Mac problem in general is the steady stream of PC A holes that troll around places like Comp USA looking for a fight. I don't mind the fighting so much, but one day the cops will catch me dumping one of the bodies.

I just switched mac to make after 4 years of being ona pc. Now I have to start all over with what software I use.

They should make almost all software on hybrid cds. (I know Adobe does this)

neoelectronaut said:

It's not so much a problem, but I just wish my old USB Logitech Quickcam would work with iChat. I'd like an iSight, but $150 is $50 more than I'd like to spend on a simple webcam.

Click to expand...

Will this help you out?

Butler Trumpet said:

Okay mine.... a couple of months ago... I turn my old iMac on, and it everything is set back to factory settings.... Weirdest thing ever.... not really sure what happens but it sucked and I spend probably the next 4 hours getting everything back, and it does it again. Finally I say screw it and I reinstall the OS. Then I have to use a 3rd party software to rip all my songs from my iPod back on to iTunes... Such a process. Anyway, its all better now cause i have a new iBook and it rocks.

So now post your worst mac/apple problem and lets hear some horror storries!

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That usually happens when the diskspace is low (~50mb left)


Worst thing that happened with my mac was when a HD i installed suddenly got corrupted, and i had to use lots of my time to recover the data i had on it, lost about 300 holidaypictures and some documents, since then i've backed up more regulary.

Butler Trumpet said:

Okay mine.... a couple of months ago... I turn my old iMac on, and it everything is set back to factory settings.... Weirdest thing ever.... not really sure what happens but it sucked and I spend probably the next 4 hours getting everything back, and it does it again. Finally I say screw it and I reinstall the OS. Then I have to use a 3rd party software to rip all my songs from my iPod back on to iTunes... Such a process. Anyway, its all better now cause i have a new iBook and it rocks.

So now post your worst mac/apple problem and lets hear some horror storries!

Click to expand...

I had that happen to my iMac, only recently. When I turned it on, i saw the standard 'dock' and it had the original applications in it. It didn't really worry me, as it now just sits there gathering dust, and when it is on, i use network startup, and run it off my PMG4.

Eple said:

That usually happens when the diskspace is low (~50mb left)

Click to expand...

nope, not in my case, it still has about 2 gigs left on the hdd.

Anywho, my worst Mac experience was when i was living in the US, and tried to update my iMac, i.e. put OS 9.2.2 on it, the US English version didn't work, and because i bought the computer in the states, i needed to do a complete install of the OS, and set it to international english. Worked fine.

Uh-oh...?

My worst experience came long, long ago at the house of a cousin. We were trying to burn a CD on his Quadra (840, I believe) AV (an 80 Mhz machine, for a historical footnote). A burn of a particular CD had failed in Toast, and for some reason I urged my cousin to make one last try at it, as I still believed the CD to be blank. We did, and the computer responded with what one might call a freeze-bomb: a system bomb (remember those?) whose Restart button could not be pushed for lack of mouse mobility.

That was the last time that the computer made a normal startup. The next time, some QuickTime component made bombs at startup; starting up without extensions did bring us to the Finder, where an idea struck me and I made a fatal mistake. Rather than take the opportunity to insert the Mac OS 8 install CD and reinstall the system, I simply copied the System file from the OS 8 CD into the System Folder of the computer. Then I restarted.

From then on nothing worked; we would get an error at the grey screen telling us that the installed system version was not meant to be used on a hard drive.

We never got it to work after that. I feel regret to this very day.

Cheers!

Back in the days before OS X, I used to have the uncanny ability to crash any Mac within a couple of hours of use. I wouldn't play around with them too much, it was just as if they knew I was willing to delve inside them and they were showing me they were willing to fight back. Fortunately OS X is much better behaved for me

My Worst Experience on a Mac

Bad RAM !! Man, that can drive you crazy, until you figure it out.

Don't buy the cheap crap and you'll be OK.

Funny though, that would be the only bad experience on a Mac since 1984!!

I repair Windoz machines; Now there's a bad experience!!

My worst Mac experience...

...was ordering the damn thing from John Lewis (UK dept. store) paying up-front, being told that it would be 2 weeks away. Five weeks later, nothing...

Phoned them, 'oh, we don't have any stock in London, there's a model in our Watford store (about 15-20 miles). It'll take a week to get here.
So after cursing, I drove up to Watford in a storm and picked it up myself... got it inside, connected it up and turned it on...

The shrieking of a deranged banshee filled the room, slowly diminishing to the quiet level of a vaccuum-cleaner...

Yep, a dual 1.42 MDD G4... six weeks later, the G5s were announced

To make matters worse, insanity drove me to shell out a lot more more for the full Verax kit.

Mind you, runs like a dream now... but will it be OK for Doom 3?

Using Airport 3.3 or above will cause my computer to crash at random intervals when the network is active. Apple denies the problem exists, yet another user on the Apple discussion boards confirms my beliefs.

Apple will not even take a report from me. I had so many crashes it felt like a Rev. A iMac and OS 9 again -_-

my worst mac experience was using an eMac.

its all I had to use at school. a 1ghz 256RAM eMac. I installed Final Cut Pro 4 on it, and it worked fine for a little bit. then after a while, whenever I would go to capture, the picture would freeze... but the computer wasnt "frozen" so to speak. no matter what I did I couldnt get it to close. hitting ESC did nothing, force quitting wouldnt work. the only way out was to hard-restart the computer (pull the plug). FCP would just randomly do that. and on top of that, when I restarted, it puts a HUGE dummy file in the Capture Scratch folder. (like, if there was 41.5gb free on disk, it would make a 41.4gb dummy file). I delete it, and try again. cross my fingers, and it works... and later it doesnt work. sometimes it will consistanly not work, to the point where I have to reinstall FCP.

overall, i've had more mac problems on an eMac than on any other machine (even iMacs work better in my experiences). my friends G4 never had a problem with FCP.

sad thing is, this kid I knew in class bought an eMac for video editing. we all tried to talk him out of it, but he had to buy it because he didnt have enough money for a tower, and he really wanted a mac..... its gonna suck when the display dies on him in a year.

paxtonandrew said:

I had that happen to my iMac, only recently. When I turned it on, i saw the standard 'dock' and it had the original applications in it. It didn't really worry me, as it now just sits there gathering dust, and when it is on, i use network startup, and run it off my PMG4.



nope, not in my case, it still has about 2 gigs left on the hdd.

Anywho, my worst Mac experience was when i was living in the US, and tried to update my iMac, i.e. put OS 9.2.2 on it, the US English version didn't work, and because i bought the computer in the states, i needed to do a complete install of the OS, and set it to international english. Worked fine.

Click to expand...

I've seen it been done with 2 GB left. OSX generally needs at least 10% of the drive free. For virtual memory I believe. OSX deletes the preference files whenever free space gets low as these are generally safe to remove. THough I wish OSX would warn you first.

My old alu 15" powerbook used to die all the time for no apparent reason. Apple did a special test on the memory I put in, nada. I swapped the sticks of memory, and thats when it didn't crash anymore. So I decided to sell it with only the original stick of apple memory, and sell the rest later. Worked out pretty well. Probably wouldn't have sold it if it didn't crash so much though.

Blue Velvet said:

...was ordering the damn thing from John Lewis (UK dept. store) paying up-front, being told that it would be 2 weeks away. Five weeks later, nothing...

Phoned them, 'oh, we don't have any stock in London, there's a model in our Watford store (about 15-20 miles). It'll take a week to get here.
So after cursing, I drove up to Watford in a storm and picked it up myself... got it inside, connected it up and turned it on...

The shrieking of a deranged banshee filled the room, slowly diminishing to the quiet level of a vaccuum-cleaner...

Yep, a dual 1.42 MDD G4... six weeks later, the G5s were announced

To make matters worse, insanity drove me to shell out a lot more more for the full Verax kit.

Mind you, runs like a dream now... but will it be OK for Doom 3?

Click to expand...

You should have shopped at Micro Anvika. John Lewis or (PJ's) is the best department store in the world for me, but not for technical equipment.

Having said that, I bought my first iPod about 18months only because everytime I went to Peter Jones I saw the little beauty and couldn't resist.

My worst Mac experience is usually the most recent istance of visiting http://www.apple.com when they have announced a new product that I really want, but can't justify - the last one for me was the G5..

The logic board on my an ibook went, but Apple dealt with that well - actually that's about the only time they did something well. I nearly awlays get emails containing "Thank you for shopping at the Apple Store. The demand for the product you ordered has been higher than anticipated.
We are shipping as quickly as possible, but cannot meet the ship date we previously estimated for you. We now expect to ship your order by..."

So finally, my wrost experience of macs is the inability of Apple to predict stock requirements. The truth is, they don't. They always air on the side of caution at our expense.

So one time my friend who's a music composition major needed help printing some musical scores the day before his senior composition recital because his printer died. I shared my printer over the LAN at college and went to his room to print the music score to my printer. So I went to the Chooser to select my printer (back before OS X) and the computer froze while he was gone to use the bathroom. Well, I force restarted it with the key combo and when it started rebooting, the sad mac with x's for eye came up and little hex numbers were under it. It played a couple notes from the twilight zone theme and then died...Needless to say my friend was ticked (WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY COMPUTER!). Well, I ended up saving his composition to disk after using a boot CD (his recital went fine), but the computer never worked right again...

-S

I hate it when McDonald's screws up your Big Mac order, or worse yet gives you a stale/cold Mac.