Betalogue

Here’s the latest chapter in my on-going saga with Panther freezes.

Since my tests pretty much eliminated the suspicion of a defective RAM module, I tried the next thing on the list, which was to switch to wired Ethernet access to my Local Area Network instead of AirPort-based access about a week ago.

Around the same time, the weather here in Nova Scotia started getting noticeably cooler, as it usually does after mid-August. This caused a drop of several degrees Celsius in my CPU temperature as reported by Temperature Monitor.

Since then, I have had only one freeze, and it was last Friday while I was fooling around with GarageBand and obviously taxing the system a bit. (The indicator in GarageBand was orange.)

It’s no excuse, of course. My system should be more than capable of handling a program such as GarageBand, even with multiple tracks. But it seems to confirm other reports pointing to a mix of heavy network and hard drive activity being conducive to system freezes.

In fact, the freezes are now even being reported on MacFixIt.com. The possible solutions mentioned in that article don’t work as far as I can tell. I’ve always had my Downloads folder on a separate partition and that has never prevented my system from freezing. I recently rebuilt my directory with DiskWarrior and that didn’t help with the freezes either.

The article also mentions AirPort as a possible culprit. As I said, I switched from AirPort to Ethernet as my main network connection on the G4, but I still have the AirPort connection on, because I need to be able to monitor the connection status on the AirPort Base Station, which cannot be done, as far as I can tell, through the Ethernet connection to the LAN that gets its Internet connection from the Base Station.

What I might try next is downgrading to AirPort 3.2. This solution has been mentioned in several different places.

By the time I’ve exhausted all the possible solutions, hopefully Apple will have come up with a fix! As a MacFixIt.com reader says, these freezes are, well, very OS 9ish…

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 at 3:23 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.