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Snow Leopard issues

iNetsynch said:
Actually comparing Snow Leopard to Vista would be a compliment to Apple. Currently, I use my Mac maybe 60%, Vista 48% and Linux 2% of the time I am working. There is much to appreciate in my Mac but so many applications crash with a complete loss of data (two of the worst offenders are Safari and MacSpeech Dictate). Apps crash on my Vista machine but I don't lose data and the crash rate is far less then I now see on my Apple.

Contrary to Apple propaganda, I find the matured Vista is more stable than Leopard. It will be interesting to see if Apple gets the traditional free ride from the press on Snow Leopard issues. As always will wait 4 - 6 months to take the bait and hope MacSpeech gets its act together and Apple fixes Safari.
Click to expand...

I think you are in the minority on your Vista vs. OS X comparisons. Having used both for over a year I can't say that I see the positives of Vista.

While Vista is fairly stable, it is infuriating to use, slow, bloated, etc.

As to OS X crashes, I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I don't get the perception that most users are experiencing major crash issues with OS X.

I use Adobe Lightroom for photo work, use MS Office, VPN software, etc, on my iMac and I have literally not had a single crash on the machine in the six months I have owned it.

Methinks thou doth protest too much.
 
jmpage2 said:
I think you are in the minority on your Vista vs. OS X comparisons. Having used both for over a year I can't say that I see the positives of Vista.

While Vista is fairly stable, it is infuriating to use, slow, bloated, etc.

As to OS X crashes, I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I don't get the perception that most users are experiencing major crash issues with OS X.

I use Adobe Lightroom for photo work, use MS Office, VPN software, etc, on my iMac and I have literally not had a single crash on the machine in the six months I have owned it.

Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Click to expand...

Not protesting just making an observation. I offer up a podcast comparing my experiences on both platforms and I swing between love / hate for both Mac OS X and Vista. I believe if you peek at the MacSpeech Dictate forum you will see verification of my claims of frequent crashes. (I have over 40 Dictate crash logs and this is not that unusual for this application.)

All that said, I am spending most of my time working on my Mac and for the most part I enjoy the machine and OS. When I am spending more time on my Vista tower as in producing animated videos or editing audio book files I find it far more stable. Vista had major issues when released but it is not the Vista I started with.

I would not want to part with either my Mac or Vista machine. Both have features I need and use every day.

Cheers
 
Simplicated said:
Here's my list of issues.

1. System-wide: Traditional Chinese font looks really bad.
2. Spaces: Spaces no longer has slow-mo.
3. Spaces: When you go to Spaces, the grids are shifted up. (See attachment)
4. Dock: You can no longer change a stack's option by clicking and holding.
5. Finder: Texts in Action button are smaller than the texts in the File menu.
6. Spaces: Very sluggish animation while switching between spaces using Control- shortcuts.
Click to expand...

I would say 4 is by design because otherwise it's completely inconsistent with other dock icons (click and hold = action not context menu. So on stacks they open, on apps they expose etc.)

And 6 appears to be caused by a filter error. Looking at console, the Window server is generating hundreds of "Invalid filter 9" every time spaces are switched. Hopefully fixing that is a trivial fix for 10.6.1 (it may even be the act of generating those errors causing the slow down in the first place)
 
tried playing java games on yahoo, i dunno what happened but the font it defaults to is horrible. still trying to figure out how to fix that. didn't have this problem in leopard, so i'm not sure what the deal is.
 
iNetsynch said:
Not protesting just making an observation. I offer up a podcast comparing my experiences on both platforms and I swing between love / hate for both Mac OS X and Vista. I believe if you peek at the MacSpeech Dictate forum you will see verification of my claims of frequent crashes. (I have over 40 Dictate crash logs and this is not that unusual for this application.)

All that said, I am spending most of my time working on my Mac and for the most part I enjoy the machine and OS. When I am spending more time on my Vista tower as in producing animated videos or editing audio book files I find it far more stable. Vista had major issues when released but it is not the Vista I started with.

I would not want to part with either my Mac or Vista machine. Both have features I need and use every day.

Cheers
Click to expand...

I have not turned on my Vista machine even one time since getting my Mac and getting Windows 7 (beta) set up under boot camp and VMWare.

As to your crashes, it sure sounds like the crash issue you are referring to is application specific.

There are hairy applications in Windows that also crash frequently. The best solution is typically to stop the use of such applications until the developer addresses them.
 
has anybody had a issue of not being able to throw away files from stacks to the trash. This is really annoying in leopard i was able to do it but now i have to hold the file on the trash icon so i can jump into the folder. So far worse experience with apple.

Im not saying its the worst experience because of stacks but ive had a huge problem with the upgrade and and downgrade. Just my two cents
 
Early 2008 Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8GHz Quad-Core, 10GB RAM. Upgraded (not a clean install) from 10.5.8 to 10.6.

Issues:
- Safari gives me the spinning beachball of death every now and then. Never used to.
- Immediately upon logging into the Mac for the first time after the install, the "fontworker" process died. I submitted the crash report to Apple.
- Snow Leopard lost the desktop picture on my second monitor, and reset it to the Aurora default.
- About 9 minutes later, after I was doing normal everyday tasks: Exposé, System Prefs etc., "SystemUIServer" crashed. Again, I submitted the crash report to Apple.
- 98 events on my calendars claimed to have been modified. They actually hadn't so there's something wrong with the SyncServer thingy.

After having had to wait two days longer than Apple said, I might very well need to do a clean install instead. There seem to be a few problems that a clean install *might* fix.
 
Fontworker process is killing me!

Hi guys,

I've just upgraded my macbook pro (2.4ghz, 6800gt - it's not the unibody) from leo to snow leo.

I immediately started experiencing serious slows down, with the colour wheel rolling all over the place at any minimum operation on any software.

I opened the activity manager and I realized that a process called FONTWORKER was keeping the CPU busy at 80% or so (on and off, not cotinuously). If I try to kill the process, it starts again automatically.

This way my mac is COMPLETELY unusable.

What should I do?
 
damascato said:
Hi guys,

I've just upgraded my macbook pro (2.4ghz, 6800gt - it's not the unibody) from leo to snow leo.

I immediately started experiencing serious slows down, with the colour wheel rolling all over the place at any minimum operation on any software.

I opened the activity manager and I realized that a process called FONTWORKER was keeping the CPU busy at 80% or so (on and off, not cotinuously). If I try to kill the process, it starts again automatically.

This way my mac is COMPLETELY unusable.

What should I do?
Click to expand...

Fontworker is not a standard OSX process.

try doing this from the terminal;

1 ps -ef grep fontworker
2 note the process id of fontworker (number in 2nd column)
3 type kill -9 (process #) nohup

That will hopefully kill it and prevent it from restarting.

You should also type fontworker into spotlight and open it up in finder and figure out what it is.

Worst case, do a reinstall from scratch of Snow Leopard.
 
Code: 
$ man fontworker

fontworker(8)             BSD System Manager's Manual            fontworker(8)

NAME
     fontworker -- Mac OS X system font registration and validation daemon

SYNOPSIS
     fontworker

DESCRIPTION
     fontworker is a system daemon that registers and validates font for the system.

     There are no configuration options to fontworker.  Users should not run fontworker manually.

SEE ALSO
     fontd(8)

HISTORY
     The fontworker daemon first appeared in MacOS X 10.6.

Mac OS                          August 30, 2009                         Mac OS
 
sidewinder said:
Code: 
$ man fontworker

fontworker(8)             BSD System Manager's Manual            fontworker(8)

NAME
     fontworker -- Mac OS X system font registration and validation daemon

SYNOPSIS
     fontworker

DESCRIPTION
     fontworker is a system daemon that registers and validates font for the system.

     There are no configuration options to fontworker.  Users should not run fontworker manually.

SEE ALSO
     fontd(8)

HISTORY
     The fontworker daemon first appeared in MacOS X 10.6.

Mac OS                          August 30, 2009                         Mac OS
Click to expand...

I read that, but it's not clear AT ALL to me.... I just know that it slows down my system at the point to be not usable, damn it!
 
iChat seems to be a little buggy with the status menu. If you switch from any status (away, itunes updater, etc.) to available, the previous status actually sticks until you change it to something other than available. really strange.


Is there any way to report bugs to apple?
 
I have had two crashes since installing (as upgrade), both noticed when I woke it from sleep, only to find the 'colorful snow' screen. I removed the MAudio and Logitech KEXTs after the last crash, hopefully that solves it.

2009 Mac pro 2.26x8

Edit - Another 'colorful snow' screen, but this time force quit worked (it didn't before). Possibly a screen saver problem?
 
I've seemed to have lost about 1 hour of battery life

Track pad doesn't appear to register "taps" very well, I seem to be tapping two or three times before it registers and performs the intended action.

MacBook Pro v4.1-2.5 GHz
 
Day 3 and still no crashes or major problems. Came across another couple of small possible compatibility issues today though...

1) Adium logs me out on sleep, and doesn't log back in again on wake.
2) Not sure if it's just a coincidence but VLC remote for VLC/iphone seems to disconnect my wireless connection every time I've used it since upgrading to 10.6
 
jmpage2 said:
I have not turned on my Vista machine even one time since getting my Mac and getting Windows 7 (beta) set up under boot camp and VMWare.

As to your crashes, it sure sounds like the crash issue you are referring to is application specific.

There are hairy applications in Windows that also crash frequently. The best solution is typically to stop the use of such applications until the developer addresses them.
Click to expand...
You are right and make an excellent point. An operating system, even an excellent and stable operating system cannot save users from poorly written applications. To large extent, this is what happened when Microsoft released Vista. Drivers and applications became the weak link and unlike the Apple the effect of compatibility issues was greatly amplified by the fact that Windows is still the predominant operating system throughout the world. Unfortunately, many ignored this simple fact and condemned the operating system.

I would love to be able to switch to a more stable speech to text application that I could run natively on my Mac but unfortunately MacSpeech is the only game in town if you are using an Intel-based Macintosh. This also highlights one of the reasons I could not now give up my Windows machines. As it turns out I have two excellent and very stable speech to text applications available to me when using Vista. I fear that in the case of Apple the only way we will ever see a truly stable and useful speech to text application that is competitive with either the Nuance NaturallySpeaking or Vista speech recognition is if Apple decides to enter this market and provide a quality product.

As noted in my posting, I am also having significant problems with Safari and I am not alone. A simple review of forum postings will show that others have recently experienced increased number of crashes when using Safari.

The bottom line, I used each machine as a tool and pick the one that does the job best rather than the one that Jobs me is the best.
 
bfc said:
I've seemed to have lost about 1 hour of battery life

Track pad doesn't appear to register "taps" very well, I seem to be tapping two or three times before it registers and performs the intended action.

MacBook Pro v4.1-2.5 GHz
Click to expand...

I've also noticed some of this.

lol... my experience with SL has been bitter sweet. Everything went smooth when I upgraded, but one of my apps was causing my MB to not sleep. So two days and 3 clean installs later, I had to manually install all my apps, and stay away form iGetter (that's what I've been able to figure out was causing my problem).

One ISSUE that I just noticed is that when you move a file form a Stacks folder to Trash, when you Right Click it in Trash, it doesn't give you the Put Back option... Anybody else getting the same thing?

other than that tho, I have to say it's all smooth sailing for me. No lag, no freezing, no system failures.
 
HBOC said:
themepark doesn't work as well. Itunes statition wasn't working a few weeks ago, but now it is capable.

cyberduck is now compatable, sorta. I am unsure of any other apps being non compatable. Hopefully iStat is soon...

candybar IS compatable!
Click to expand...

Well ya, themepark would probably need a complete rewrite...
 
Lucas111 said:
Oh and...

3) Every time I try and go into the Connect360, DivX, Flip4Mac WMV, Perian and the Wacom Tablet preference panels System Preferences needs to restart. Not a huge problem, still annoying.
Click to expand...

Perian has a 64bit version out, I think its a beta version. Just look for it.
 
Snow Leopard installed and iPhone 3GS videos

i installed SL and now my videos imported into iPhoto from my 3GS don't play when clicked from the photos section. With Leopard, all I needed to do was to click the video and QuickTime opened. Now nothing. They do play when viewed from the movies section of iTunes. :confused:
 
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