Mac OS X 10.2.5: A nasty one

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 1st, 2003 • 12:51 am

Things are definitely not right with the Mac OS X 10.2.5 update. Ever since I installed it, I have been experiencing an abnormally high number of system-wide crashes. They happen out of the blue, sometimes after the machine has been running fine for more than a day.

The last one just happened half an hour ago. I had been using the machine all day, with no problems. Then I double-clicked on an RTF file that caused TextEdit to launch. It opened the RTF file in question, and then Safari crashed! I had forgotten to add the Console application back to my Login Items after reinstalling my system on April 19, 2003. So after the Safari crash I went to “System Preferences” to add it back to my Login Items. I clicked on the “Show All” button, Mac OS X started resizing the System Preferences window to accomodate the bigger preference pane, and then froze before the transition was over, with the spinning beach ball.

I was still able to switch to another application (TextEdit) in the next few seconds, but only the menu bar changed. The TextEdit document window that should have been in the foreground stayed in the background. Then I got the spinning beachball in TextEdit as well. At that stage things stopped working entirely. Force-quitting would not work. I couldn’t switch to anything any more. The only thing that worked was the spinning beachball animation and the mouse pointer was still moving. That’s it. I had to do a hard reset.

The problem is that this is not the first time. Since April 19, I would say I have experienced this already 5 or 6 times. The circomstances were slightly different, but most of the symptoms above were the same.

That’s a pretty bad track record for an operating system that’s supposed to be rock-solid! What’s the point of HAVING moved to Mac OS X if there are as many system-wide crashes as in Mac OS 9? Very, very bad.


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