Snow Leopard inbuilt screensaver crash

[eN0ch]

There are other threads about 3rd party screensaver problems in SL. But I'm having trouble with SL's own built-in screensaver.

An hour after installing SL, I came to find a black screen, and endless beachball spinning and no hope of waking the machine up. Forced restart. Got into Sys Prefs > Desktop & screen saver > Screensaver. Tried to select an item in the list. Back to beachballing and Sys Prefs maxing out the CPU.

Finally managed to find a way to disable the screensaver entirely.

Is anyone else getting this? Does it have anything to do with the 64-bit / 32-bit thing? (Sorry - I'm not very geeky) Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[eN0ch]

OK, further clue discovered. I'd say it's a bug.

It seems to be caused by adding or selecting a folder or item in the list that either has no data or only has aliases. I was trying to use my existing Pictures folder which has a bunch of aliases to a bigger collection of images.

So presumably nothing to do with the 64-bit thing?

 

[IanMacKaye]

There are other threads about 3rd party screensaver problems in SL. But I'm having trouble with SL's own built-in screensaver.

An hour after installing SL, I came to find a black screen, and endless beachball spinning and no hope of waking the machine up. Forced restart. Got into Sys Prefs > Desktop & screen saver > Screensaver. Tried to select an item in the list. Back to beachballing and Sys Prefs maxing out the CPU.

Finally managed to find a way to disable the screensaver entirely.

Is anyone else getting this? Does it have anything to do with the 64-bit / 32-bit thing? (Sorry - I'm not very geeky) Any ideas?

Thanks.

Same problem over here. How did you manage to disable the screensaver?

 

[eN0ch]

I frankly don't remember now, Ian. But what I think I might have done would be:

• force quit system preferences (force restart computer if that doesn't work)

• re-open desktop/screensaver panel

• by default it should open at flurry or one of the built-in modules - if not select any one of those as quickly as possible

• that should keep it stable while you grab the slider bar at bottom right and drag it to the far right ('never')

HTH

 

[The Californian]

Did you report this to Apple?

 

[eN0ch]

yes, I used the macosx feedback form.

 

[sausageboss]

Just came across this issue myself.

What made it extra vexing is that it happened because I moved data around on an external drive and I guess broke the files the screensaver was linked to. I burned a few hours assuming the drive was somehow mucking with the power management.

Solution was to delete -

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.*.plist

whack all those files, then reconfigure your screensaver.

snow leopard is still in beta. that's why it was only $29.

I frankly don't remember now, Ian. But what I think I might have done would be:

• force quit system preferences (force restart computer if that doesn't work)

• re-open desktop/screensaver panel

• by default it should open at flurry or one of the built-in modules - if not select any one of those as quickly as possible

• that should keep it stable while you grab the slider bar at bottom right and drag it to the far right ('never')

HTH

 

[StevenCNYC]

Same problem uses Photos as screen saver

There are other threads about 3rd party screensaver problems in SL. But I'm having trouble with SL's own built-in screensaver.

An hour after installing SL, I came to find a black screen, and endless beachball spinning and no hope of waking the machine up. Forced restart. Got into Sys Prefs > Desktop & screen saver > Screensaver. Tried to select an item in the list. Back to beachballing and Sys Prefs maxing out the CPU.

Finally managed to find a way to disable the screensaver entirely.

Is anyone else getting this? Does it have anything to do with the 64-bit / 32-bit thing? (Sorry - I'm not very geeky) Any ideas?

Thanks.

It first crashed in Preferences in the preview of the screen saver, but then I got it to run at which point I had a black screen that I couldn't stop without powering down the computer. I just changed to the coverflow screen saver, but I really want to use my Photos again. Worked fine prior to upgrade to Snow Leopard. I do have a lot of photos in a lot of subfolders, but still.

Any fixes. I've seen posts on the mac.com site.

 

[eN0ch]

Not sure whether you'd call this a "fix'. (Maybe more a concession to reality ... ) But I replaced all the aliases in my Pictures folder with original image files. Worked perfectly ever since. That's all I know ...