I swear to god I must be the most unlucky Mac user. I've talked to all my friends who own Macs and the stuff I've run across NEVEr happens to them. Take for instance last night. I'm popping in a DVD to rip to my iPod and open up handbrake. At the same time Time Machine starts up but hangs, which in turn is causing my entire system to freeze. No apps are responsive. I can't force quit them from either the activity monitor or the command line. Hell I can't even unmount my external hard drive. In fact I couldn't even shut down the computer because the system couldn't kill iTunes, firefox, handbrake, or Adium. Instead I physically yank the USB cable to my external drive and lo and behold the system starts responding again with the warning that my disk my be corrupted now. Thankfully I booted off the Leopard DVD and did a repair of the disk and I was fine...but still.
Weird *** behavior that I NEVER have under Windows and don't tell me its my hardware. I took my laptop into Apple and they ran some extensive diagnostics on the thing with 0 problems found...so if it is my hardware there is jack I can do about it. Is it any wonder why I bitch so much?
My G5 iMac, too, experiences that kind of behaviour somewhat often. In my case, however, I was lucky (or unlucky?
) enough to isolate the issue: It turns out that my external iSight and my external LaCie FireWire hard drive sometimes conflict with one another... Back when I used Tiger and had my iTunes library on the external drive, sometimes playback would stutter or stop altogether and, I figure, more than half of the times I had to unplug the iSight before my USB-connected 5G iPod could even start synching...
Right now I upgraded my internal hard drive and moved back my iTunes library to it, but I'm getting the same random, abnormal behaviour with Time Machine; sometimes it'll just fail to perform the backup. The operative word being *sometimes*, a fact that bothers me to no end. It seems that either this model's I/O controller is very finicky, or Mac OS X still has some nasty and pervasive unsolved bugs... It could also be that my peripherals just don't like each other very well.
Oh well, at least I know, to some extent, what's causing it and and, thus, don't have to be pointlessly forcing restarts on my machine. I always keep my iSight unplugged for long periods of time until I need it for chatting with my brother, and leave it plugged for a while and forget about it until things go awry again; when they do, I just curse Apple (or LaCie... If I'm feeling grumpy I curse both
), unplug it again, and I'm all set.
PS- No one ever did explain to me how on Tiger, even 10.4.10 why when I shut my computer down instead of turning it off occasionally it would simply kill the GUI and send me to the command line of OS X....not even the folks at the Apple store could explain that one.
Maybe that has to do with some obscure setting in EFI/OpenFirmware? I remember that when had my iMac's logic board replaced for the first time (my iMac G5 is a Rev.A, which was under the Repair Extension Programme, and that time it turned out that the new board was even worse than the original, which luckily started failing four days before the warranty expired and had to be replaced a second time anyway
- when this one inevitably fails too, my iMac will start looking a lot like Swamp Castle
), the guys from the authorized service center forgot to toggle some "verbose mode" setting, which made my Mac look a lot like a PC when booting and shutting down, showing the whole process on OS X's rarely seen black & white CLI... When I first saw it I almost panicked, but when I finally figured why it was behaving like that, I got curious about it. I know where Jef Raskin's and SJ's ideas of "hiding" (and sometimes altogether blocking) the technicalities from end-users come from, and still prefer having my iMac show three or four different shades of grey and blue any day of the week to the unholy mess that a BIOS-based PC startup looks like, but it was fun to know a bit more about the inner workings of my computer for a while.
