Despite what advertising says, Mac’s DO freeze.. well they either Freeze (mouse still moves, keyboard lights works, but the applications are dead as a doornail), Hang (the beach ball of death and nothing else), or actually Crash (kernel panic, smoke, fire, universe folds in on itself). All of which are to the normal user, annoying.
My Mac sometimes hangs, or freezes, I’m not entirely sure, which, or to be honest am bothered about which actual physical end the kernel ends up in, it’s annoying. I’ve tried a number of things to fix it. I at first thought that might be heated related. The Dual Processor G5 PPC sits at about 45-50 degrees, which I thought was running a bit hot, but having checked the insides, everything seems to be running just fine fan wise and cooling wise (including the sometimes weird fan control of OSX).
The inbuilt Disk First Aid of OSX is quite good, but the other week, after one of the numerous reboots, I decided to check the disks. I’m always very uncomfortable about rebooting the machine after a hang or freeze. The standard OSX disk utility reports some errors, and then in probably a worst nightmare situation said that the ‘drive repair had failed due to the underlying disk being unable to exit the application’, whatever that meant.
This of course started alarm bells in my head.. I did a search of the net and found a alternative disk repair and maintenance application called Diskwarrior. It apparently does a much better job at repairing disks than the standard OSX disk utility. So I ordered a copy (thankfully it runs on Intel and PPC macs, so would be handy for all the Macs I have).
When I got a bootable CD copy (you require the boxed bootable version to be able to repair startup disks), I starts the Mac, held down C to select the CD boot, and eventually got the Diskwarrior interface and CD boot Mac OSX. I ran the repair on the startup disk and it reported a number of serious errors in the structure and permissions on the drive, and after a good hour of chunking, presented me with the option of replacing the selected drive with a nice new repaired and optimsed copy.
It actually reported a few errors in the drive and applications structure that ‘..could cause OS instability‘ so I hoped that would be the end of my issues. To be fair, it’s done a fantastic job, and although my drive wasn’t completed toast, it claims to be able to salvage pretty knackered disks with ease. My freezing issues are still present though (admittedly on a lesser frequency though!), and I’m at a lost to understand why..
I don’t think it’s a higher power trying to convince me that I need to buy that 24 inch iMac, I think it’s definitely software related. The freezing does seem to be more graphics related though; moving application to other monitors, the genie effect on some applications, screen savers using quartz.. but that also could be just me looking for reasons..
I could also rebuild OSX, there’s nothing on my startup drive that can’t be easily recreated.. although I’m not sure where OSX keeps my mail store when I’m using the standard Mail application (I’d quite like to keep my old none gMail mail store)..
Half of me wants the new Intel Mac so I can start running my old windows applications again, half says I really don’t need a new Mac.. It’s time to bite the bullet soon I think given the death of the PPC versions of Mac with Adobe’s release of CS3 for universal binaries..
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