Screen saver freezes in Panther: Maybe it’s the screen saver itself

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 17th, 2004 • 4:20 am

The more I think about my latest screen saver freeze in Panther (yesterday morning), the more I think I might have been misguided in my troubleshooting endeavours all along… Instead of trying to isolate an external factor (USB devices, Mail application, Internet connection, etc.) that might be causing the computer to freeze as it is waking up from sleep after having gone first into screen saver mode and then into display sleep mode, maybe I should start wondering if the screen saver itself is not to blame.

The reason I am saying this is the following. Because of all these freezes occurring exactly as the computer was waking from display sleep and displaying the last screen it was displaying before putting the displays to sleep (i.e. a screen saver animation frame), I actually turned off the screen saver a few weeks ago. And things have definitely improved.

So why did I get a screen saver freeze again yesterday? Because, while I’ve turned the automatic screen saver off (by setting it to “Never“), I still have a “hot corner” that I use to start the screen saver manually when I leave the computer knowing full well that I won’t come back to it until later. It’s my way of telling the computer: Yes, you can start saving juice right away, I am not coming back. And that’s what I did the day before yesterday, when I went to bed. Instead of just leaving the computer as it was and let it go into display sleep after 20 minutes, I went to the hot corner to start the screen saver manually (and let the displays go to sleep automatically after 20 minutes). When I came back the next morning, I had a screen saver freeze.

So maybe I shouldn’t be blaming my USB audio hub or PowerWave. Maybe the problem is with the screen saver itself. What I’ll do now is that I will completely disable the screen saver, by also eliminating all hot corners.

Of course, this theory doesn’t account for the freezes that I have experienced while working on the computer. But these are even rarer, so I might as well try to eliminate the screen saver first and see what happens.


2 Responses to “Screen saver freezes in Panther: Maybe it’s the screen saver itself”

  1. jim says:

    i had my problems with system hanging both after waking from screensaver or while doing stuff. same was baffled and couldn’t isolate the problem. even looking through console log didn’t help.

    someone suggested to me to erase the “auto-fill” for safari and also to clear the icon cache…and some how…it worked. i’ve not gotten a “hang” for a couple of days and it might be safari that’s causing it. might not be the same for you but worth a look.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    The real test will be to see if it works long-term. My freezes occur on a very intermittent basis (usually once a week or even less, but sometimes 2 or 3 in a few days), so not having had a “hang” in a couple of days would not exactly be conclusive :).

    Keep us posted!

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