Tiger and Expose problems

[Teeolee]

okay, this is quite complicated to explain, but I shall try...

running on an iBook G4 with tiger 10.4.0, sometimes i loose control of the following: Exposé, Dashboard, Application Switching (apple + tab), and finder goes very slow. It happens all of the time, and the only way to sort it at the moment is to force restart the computer, as clicking restart does nothing.

Any ideas are welcome, i'm currently stuck in this state, so I will be able to try ideas straight away.

t.

 

[36183]

well once you get out of this mess, put the terminal in your dock. and use for "kill pid" commands

 

[mkrishnan]

well once you get out of this mess, put the terminal in your dock. and use for "kill pid" commands

This morning, I had a lock in which Finder itself locked and would not relaunch from the apple menu. It was infuriating. No dock, so I couldn't get a terminal window... But other apps continued to work. I guess the only thing I could've done is had a terminal running in the back. Maybe I should always keep one back there.

 

[Teeolee]

well once you get out of this mess, put the terminal in your dock. and use for "kill pid" commands

Can you expand on this? how do i do that? and i can get to terminal now if it helps...

 

[mkrishnan]

Can you expand on this? how do i do that? and i can get to terminal now if it helps...

It can become complicated, and in particular, I do not know how to relaunch Finder. But one thing you can try, if you do have a terminal window available at the time, is "killall Dock" (Dock must be capitalized like that). This will force the Dock to restart, and along with it Dashboard and Exposé.

 

[36183]

Can you expand on this? how do i do that? and i can get to terminal now if it helps...

open the terminal, type in "top"

then you get a ugly version of the activity monitor with "pid" numbers next to the processor names.

find the pid number of the apps that is annoying you, then open a new terminal window (command+n) and type in "kill pid [pid number]"

 

[mkrishnan]

Another similar thing you can do, which doesn't require two terminals, but is harder to remember is:

ps -aux | grep -i "xxx"

Where xxx is part of the name of the application you're looking for. The second field in the output is the PID. So if you replace xxx with finder, you'll get finder. If you replace it, for instance, with "dash," you'll get a list of all the dashboard tasks running. And then you can use that list (it doesn't take over the term to keep updating like top does) to quit the app.

Then again, the advantage of top is that the thing causing your machine to hang is probably using most of the CPU time, so it'll be at the top of top!

 

[Teeolee]

thanks guys, typing "killall Dock" sorted it.

now i need to find a way to be able to do this each time

t.

 

[blodwyn]

thanks guys, typing "killall Dock" sorted it.

now i need to find a way to be able to do this each time

t.

You could always use Automator. I've attached a (very) basic sample workflow, check it out and if it works for you, you can save it as an application.