Who Says that OS X Doesn't crash?

[awulf]

OS X crashes a lot for me especially on my home computer, I usually get the Beach Ball spinning for ever and nothing works except for moving around the curser. At home I can sometimes recover my computer from another unix machine through SSH but that doesn't always work. Sometimes my computers HD does some hard-work, and then the computer just Logs out.

In these cases the computer didn't 'Crash' but if you loose your work do to it logging out automatically or bringing up the Beach Ball of Death, I would call these cases a Crash.

Maybe I am just cursed.

OS X computers that I have crashed: PM 466 (10.2), iMac G3 600 (Graphite)(10.2), eMac 800 (10.2), iMac DV 400 (10.1), iMac SE 600 (Snow)(10.1)

 

[howard]

i've had programs crash on me a few times for whatever reason. os x hasn't fully crashed on me that much...actually only a few times and it was because of some weird thing it had going with a usb hub. so i stopped using it. os x DOES crash, just very rarely, at least for me.

 

[mac15]

I've never had X crash on me for the hell of it, never ever had, I've had crashes due to bum drivers with hardware.

So for me X has never died in its own

 

[MacBandit]

Sounds like it must be related to something you are installing or using.

I have never had the problems that you are noting.

 

[.a]

i use os x everyday for one year - crashed about 6 times - 4 times because of usb/bluetooth adapter - the other two times i really do not know - and twice there was no mousecursor on the screen visible (really strange, i relaunched the finder (really tricky one without seeing your mousecursor!) but that did not help) so i had to restart...

in the end: os x is very stable - os 9 crashed everyday (...) and last week i sat in front of windows 98 and wanted to switch the screen resolution, and guess what: it crashed!

lang lebe os x!

.a

 

[sageenos]

I've had about two series of crashes since I got my powerbook...the computer would totally lock up, so I would reboot, work for a couple minutes, then it would happen again. I just shut my computer down for a few minutes before I booted again and it worked fine.

 

[Stike]

My OS 10.2 crashes (we are talking kernel panic here) only every few months, and only during heavy load and many open apps that are not really secure. (alpha, beta, whatdaheck)

The last crash was new year, the crash before was August...

 

[e-coli]

Jaguar has never crashed on me even once. I'd say you have a hardware problem.

 

[tylerellwood]

I get kernal panics every once in a while, mainly because of FCP trying to gain camera control from my miniDV.

 

[swampdonky]

It's funny, but not haha funny - when you get your new superfast dual G4 plug it in and starts making that kinda clunky sound - the beach ball starts spinnning as you try to copy your files to the hard drive and it stalls - not just for seconds, but minutes! It's not funny when you waste all day trying to resolve this issue with the vendor and apple and have to send the shiny new superfast dual g4 back to where it came from.

 

[Mr. MacPhisto]

I've been running on an iBook 700 with Combo for six months on Jaguar and have never had a crash. Programs have failed, and it has sometimes seemed like the OS would crash. I'd hit CMD-OPT-ESC and nothing would come up, but if I waited 20-30 seconds, the force quit dialogue would appear and I'd just kill the problem program.

I've also tried to kill OS X through the terminal by hogging up the memory and giving the interface very, very little to work with (we're talking in the low Ks, below 128). I've managed to crash linux a couple of times doing this, but the three times I've done it in X, I've been able to force quite the terminal to stop the problem. Granted, it did take over 5 minutes for force quit to come up, but it still did come up and the machine didn't crash. If you manage your computer properly and don't load it up with bad programs, then X should stay pretty solid.

It's working even better now that I've upgraded from 256 MB to 640 MB. Before it did have some problems running my Spiderman game properly, but now everything works quite well, included VPC - at least as well as can be expected.

 

[gerror]

In the beginning had a few crashes with my flatpanel. But since I'm using 10.23 and now 10.24 I think I didn't had one

 

[Pedro Estarque]

My only crash in this machine ( iMac G3 600) was last year running VPC 6, Photoshop ( 90 % RAM allocation) and AfterEffects at the same time. VPC is very buggy in my opinion. It has corrupted my image drive and I have to forcequit it periodically. Only use it for Kazaa.

 

[whooleytoo]

I performed an upgrade-install of 10.2 on a G3/350 and it was extremely unstable, several kernel panics, spinning pizzas etc..

On a clean install on a new 17" iMac, I've only had a couple of issues; if you leave some volumes (especially Samba volumes) mounted for a long time, it can bring the system to it's knees so you have to hard-reboot or power down & up. (Apple is aware of this problem, but I've no idea when a fix is due).

I've noticed twice recently too, my screensaver has frozen when I came back to my machine. Tried all the various escape routes, but eventually had to reboot. On the second occasion, I just left the machine in the 'frozen' state for 5 minutes, and the screensaver eventually just resumed by itself.. weird..

Mike.

 

[sparkleytone]

i just had to reboot for the first time in 21 days. My iBook 600 runs supremely stable in OS X. The only reason I even rebooted was because a badly scratched cd was locking the system and i didnt have time to wait for it. I needed to study, so I rebooted.

 

[awulf]

My user interface crashed twice today. First in the morning the Computers HD was spinning like mad and the Beach ball was spinning and everything else was frozen (time, dock, everything) but I could move that beach ball around. So I pushed the reset button. And again tonight I launched MS Word and then word got stuck on the splash screen, and as I clicked to the dock to force quit, the Dock crashed, the same happened as I clicked to any other app. iTunes kept playing until the song finished and didn't go onto the next one. I SSHed my computer from my dads and killed a whole heap of apps, including window manager etc. The computer logged out but got stuck in the blue back ground (still with the beach ball), in the SSH terminal I could see the computer opening up Login. After not succeeding to recover the machine I typed reboot.

I don't mind if this happens once in a while but, it crashes too many times for a UNIX based OS. (almost as bad as OS 9).

I have noticed my HD having some difficulties, like making some scratching sounds when trying to access a certain part of the disk (which was some where where prefs were kept because I lost some) The HD now only scratches when I run a surface scan and then Drive 10 tells me the media failed and I need to back up and reformat my HD and do the surface scan again.

Could it be corrupt OS creating these problems?

I've done a Hardware check with the 'Apple Hardware Test' CD not too long ago, I might just try it again.

 

[Raiden]

Ive had only 1 crash, in 10.1. Too bad it destroyed my harddrive.

And we believe someone, and not something, engineered the whole thing, so it wasnt the OS's fault. (conspiracy!)

 

[jaguarx]

Nevert had a crach on my powerbook. Ever. Even compared to win2k which is considered pretty danr stable, OSX seems damn stable to me.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

I have been using X for 2 years and yes i have had crashes but never the whole OS. just the app running at the time. Usaully this is with a lot going on at the same time. I have found OSX to be the best OS i have ever used and think its Great. Those with crashes should make sure they are running newest version of their software apps and have Lots of good clean memory. OsX loves memory and with lots of it osX will love you. Just my nickels worth.

 

[iPegboy]

Only a couple of applications have gone down, but it's been since last May and my iBook 600 combo has not crashed.

 

[macmax]

even when my system was not well installed ,10.2.4 fixed my crashes.
the tech that installed jag,a friend of mine stopped the process in the middle and then started it again, i was out of town and he never told me, i wonder how it worked.

now it works perfect thou i will reinstall it next week

 

[Taft]

Originally posted by awulf
My user interface crashed twice today. First in the morning the Computers HD was spinning like mad and the Beach ball was spinning and everything else was frozen (time, dock, everything) but I could move that beach ball around. So I pushed the reset button. And again tonight I launched MS Word and then word got stuck on the splash screen, and as I clicked to the dock to force quit, the Dock crashed, the same happened as I clicked to any other app. iTunes kept playing until the song finished and didn't go onto the next one. I SSHed my computer from my dads and killed a whole heap of apps, including window manager etc. The computer logged out but got stuck in the blue back ground (still with the beach ball), in the SSH terminal I could see the computer opening up Login. After not succeeding to recover the machine I typed reboot.

I don't mind if this happens once in a while but, it crashes too many times for a UNIX based OS. (almost as bad as OS 9).

I have noticed my HD having some difficulties, like making some scratching sounds when trying to access a certain part of the disk (which was some where where prefs were kept because I lost some) The HD now only scratches when I run a surface scan and then Drive 10 tells me the media failed and I need to back up and reformat my HD and do the surface scan again.

Could it be corrupt OS creating these problems?

I've done a Hardware check with the 'Apple Hardware Test' CD not too long ago, I might just try it again.

It sounds like you have a serious harddisk problem. Hard disks shouldn't make scraping or scratching noises.

You should look into geting it repaired (ie. gettting the drive replaced). Also, for the short term, you should try starting in single-user mode and running fsck. This probably won't do squat because you've already used Drive 10, but you could try it.

Taft

 

[jkojima]

I used to get kernel panics several times a day on my new PB 867 Titanium. Nothing, including a complete wipe of the hard drive and reinstallation of the OS, would fix the problem. Then I pulled the generic brand 512MB RAM module I added to the system. It has been a week now with no crashes.

I guess the moral of this story is that hardware can be the root of some problems.

The secondary moral is that I made a dumb purchase and should have gone with name brand memory for my Apple. From now on, it gets only the best!

 

[DakotaGuy]

I have NEVER had my iBook crash in any version of OSX and I never seem to have to force quit any programs on it. It has been amazing! I use it everyday at my desk when I teach and take it with me other places. It is the most stable computer I have ever used.

My iMac DV has been running fine with OSX well over a year. In over a year of running it I have had two kernel panics. One in OSX 10.1 which was really nasty and scrolled all this stuff over my screen which was really scarry. And just a couple of days ago while running several programs including a file sharing client, OS 10.2 went down hard, dimming the screen and giving me the restart now prompt. I don't think anything is wrong. 2 crashes in 15 months of running OSX is not bad.

 

[Chrisnorth]

Crashes or Panics

I waited for Jaguar before upgrading to OSX and for the most part I've been very pleased. There is absolutely no doubt that OSX is a much more robust and capable operating system. Being able to access UNIX shell commands and functionality is also a bonus. However, when you read marketing hype about a crash free operating system, you just have to smell sulphur. I've never heard of a crash free OS, and I'm not sure that it's possible.

I think the English language has been twisted somewhat to make the claim, and in my opinion a kernel Panic or a system crash are effectively the same. Also, a complete GUI crash, which seems more common than kernel panics, is still a crash if it leaves the user in a position where a reboot is required.

I'd like to see Apple impliment a keystoke combination like Window's cmnd+alt+delete that would bring up a some kind of task manager to address anything short of a kernel panic. This would include a Windowing system crash. If this already exists within OSX, can someone elaborate on it?