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Crash on Mac versus Crash on PC

L

LiveForever

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 13, 2007
281
0
I have a mac and PC networked and use both side by side.

I'm fairly new to the mac but do in general find it a pleasure to use.

The biggest difference is what happens when a programe crashes.

The PC
Application suddenly freezes, it becomes non responsive, nothing happens even when I click the 'x' to close it off.

So hit ctrl,alt,delete- Ahh it says the application is non responding ,so right click on it, select end task to shut it down. Still nothing but now I can't get rid of the Windows Task Manager window, now its x / minimise controls have gone! OK try hitting the 'x' on the application window again, and again, ctrl alt delete, right click, shut down again and again still nothing ahhhhh. A few minutes go by and I'm just about to hold in the power button to swithch of my PC (again!)when a non responsive window message comes up. I click yes to shut down, still nothing but now there are a cascade of these messages coming up. I click yes on all of them and when I click the last one, the non responsive application eventually shuts down. However now its gone but the whole PC is cactus, the cursor seems very slow, jerky and non responsive so 9 times out of 10 I have to shut down the PC anyway!

The Mac
The spinning wheel of death shows up, nothing can be done.
I click the apple symbol in the top left , select force quit, choose the application to shut down and voila its gone and I am back running again. That simple.

Is there a key combination to press though??

For me Iv'e had enough proof that the mac works better, yes it does crash but very infrequently and when it does its no big drama.

For anyone choosing between a mac or PC this is the story I recount. Its been my experience with every PC Iv'e used at home and work, XP, Vista, 2000 and every mac OS X Iv'e used too has been just brilliant in comparison.

Sorry there endeth my rant after a frustrating 10 mins shutting my PC down!
 
ive found that when an application crashes only that application is unresponsive so you can start using other applications and just leave but by then the fans have started whirring as the cpu load has increased. unless the whole OS crashes which is very rare. then youd need to force restart the machine.

i usually just right click on the app's dock icon if i know which one is causing trouble and click force quit. i also use activity monitor as the culprit is usually in red so i choose it and just click force quit. i hardly ever use the force quit window.
 
Although I know that I risk beeing banned from this forum for showing too little enthusiasm about the Mac:

Judging from my experience your descrition is - let's put it this way - very biassed!

Having been working with Windows sinc the 3.11 Version and having switched to Mac completely by now (including a MBP and a 08 Mac Pro) I would say that crashing behaviour of booth systems is "within the same order of magnitude".
95% of al program-crashes under win are resolvable by using the Taskman. On the other side the mac is "not perfect" as well: This weekend I had two sytstem crashes wich could only be resolved by "pulling the power cord". (Booth in conjunction with iTunes downloading larger volumes of podcasts).


Florian
 
The crash experiences are my honest experiences, I promise that they are not exagerated, honestly. If I don't have to restart my whole PC I can NEVER just ctrl alt delete and close programe (years ago I could mind but not now with the latest windows).

I am not a mac fan boy I just use a mac and a PC but the mac doesn't seem to crash so much and its so easy to deal with.

If you have any tips on how I can shut down my PC without having to go through all that I'm all ears as its a pain.
 
Chipart said:
Although I know that I risk beeing banned from this forum for showing too little enthusiasm about the Mac:

Judging from my experience your descrition is - let's put it this way - very biassed!

Having been working with Windows sinc the 3.11 Version and having switched to Mac completely by now (including a MBP and a 08 Mac Pro) I would say that crashing behaviour of booth systems is "within the same order of magnitude".
95% of al program-crashes under win are resolvable by using the Taskman. On the other side the mac is "not perfect" as well: This weekend I had two sytstem crashes wich could only be resolved by "pulling the power cord". (Booth in conjunction with iTunes downloading larger volumes of podcasts).


Florian
Click to expand...

Hmm... those full system crashes are very rare. I got my first mac (TiBook) when OS X was released. In all the years I've had it, it's only fully crashed 3 times and I still use it every day.
 
I second chipart

Having OS X at home and Windows at work, both behave quite the same.
Especially with Leopard I even have more grey curtains again. And I didn't see a blue screen on XP for ages...
And I even had the scenario that a kill on the process didn't work, so that I needed a reboot.

So this whole stability thing was something that was valid 10yrs ago, when OS9 was great and Windows was really bad.
But I wouldn't claim that XP is less stable than Leopard or even Tiger.
 
Win XP is always more likely to crash with games in my experience, even now.

That's generally the only time I see the blue screen of death.
 
kresh said:
Option Key - Command Key - Escape Key (simultaneously)
Click to expand...

Or: Apple Menu > Force Quit
Or: Click & Hold (Right Click) on Dock Icon > Force Quit
Or: Activity Monitor > Select Application > Quit Process
 
A crash on Windows can also be more dramatic. The GDI goes quite low in the OSI model, this then brings a problem where a program can write to protected memory. This is why some things such as ActiveX are so insecure, they can do anything they want to the system. In OS X, the application layer sits above services such as Core Audio, Core Video, Quicktime, OpenGL etc, the application cannot get down and mess with the Darwin/OS level and through to the kernel.

In OS X you can pretty much crash these services, you just restart them. Only problem comes when the kernel panics, which is rare and really only happens when there is a hardware fault.
 
I find on Mac just pressing force quit works great, but like windows, sometimes you have to do it 30 times (exadurating) before the program will actually quit.
 
Worst-case scenario, if "force quit" doesn't work the first time, going into the activity monitor, highlighting the task and hitting "end task" does the job. Very similar to taskman in Windows.

In my experience with Mac OS X and Windows, I will say that I've only had one kernel panic on a Mac, and in the same period at least 5 BSODs on Windows. The BSODs were attributable to bad/buggy Vista device drivers. Take that for what you will, but Vista has left a horrible taste in my mouth. In fact it wasn't Apple that convinced me to go Mac; it was Microsoft.

XP was more stable than Vista and BSODs were far fewer, but as with all Windows workstations, I couldn't leave it running for too long without rebooting (max time was usually two weeks before things started going south). I've run Macs for way longer than that (30 days+ isn't uncommon, usually rebooting for software updates only, when required) without so much as a slowdown.

I've also had linux servers that have had 200+ day uptimes, but that's another story. :)
 
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