Lest I should be labeled an MS basher... I hate to prove TTL right, but I'm a little pissed off at Mac OS X Leopard's instability. It crashes once a week at least, something which was rare before. And that's even after the major upgrade recently.
... disrelated, but... good grief.
Crashing once a week sounds bad by my experience, my Mac has only crashed once since I installed Leopard. Sounds a bit like a software incompatibility - checking out those logs might be a good idea. Or check out a failing memory device.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to do any of that.
ReplyDeleteI'm biased because I work 'there' but I have Vista on my computers. Other than getting used to the new stuff, I've had absolutely no problems. But then I wouldn't even think of putting Vista on a three-year old computer. I just do 'upgrades' when I get new computers. :o)
ReplyDeleteUm the word verification offered me is uzuappl--are you trying to tell me something? ;o)
LOL, that's another great one.
ReplyDeletemike said: "Sounds a bit like a software incompatibility..."
ReplyDeleteYeah, like one of Mac OS X's kernel routines not being compatible with another? ;-)
Surely you don't mean "software incompatibility" in userland as a culprit for kernel panic?
Tutorial Part One: Checking Logs.
ReplyDeleteVenture to your Utilities folder and start up the Console application. Checkout the left hand panel and be amazed at how many Crash Reporter logs there are. Select 'system.log' to see messages written out by the system as it operates on your machine, there may be a message that the system was able to write before it crashed last time, this can be helpful in diagnosing problems. HTH!
Thanks, Mike.
ReplyDelete... doing so...
Wow! What a lot of gobbledegook!
4000 console messages in less than 2 hours, all apparently on the same topic? Sure is persistent!
ReplyDeleteIt's odd that it won't quit, though. For example, under Windoze, a device that cannot be identified is simply marked as disabled in the device manager, and things move on (or at least try to). In your case, my little finger tells me it has to be something like the mouse (don't laugh, it's quite possible) to generate that much activity.
You see, an OS generally makes a number of assumptions at boot time, simply because it has to start somewhere. Thus it starts up assuming a generic keyboard, a generic mouse, etc.
Further down the line, a program (hardware enumerator) is launched to identify and load specific drivers for the actual devices. From the looks of your log, there is something that the OS cannot identify, and cannot disable either. There are very few peripherals in that category, such as the keyboard and mouse (to avoid things like this infamous PC message: "Keyboard not found, press Del to continue").
Don't know anything specific about Apple stuff, so I can't really help you with the details, but the above might help you narrowing down the problem. Are you using fancy basic peripherals?
You may find messages like this appearing in your console log, repeating rapidly. Unwanted consequences of this are that your log files grow rapidly, and your system will not sleep.
ReplyDeleteLooking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718
Vendor ID 1193 is Canon. The devices (product ID) are Canon scanners: 8717 refers to the LiDE 20 and 8718 to the LiDE 30.
The message is caused by the software that handles the front panel buttons on these scanners. Unfortunately, Canon installs the software for both models of scanner, and the one for the scanner you don't have is not detecting a scanner and complaining by writing to the log file, thus keeping your machine awake. Equally if your scanner is not connected, you may get both messages.
Look in your login items for either
N067u-buttonmanager (LiDE 20 scanner), or
N124u-buttonmanager (LiDE 30 scanner).
If you get rid of the unwanted one, you will stop getting this message as long as your scanner is connected.
If you do not want to make use of the scanner front panel, you can disable the login item for its button manager. This is especially valuable for portable computers.
The previous was obtained by typing
ReplyDelete"matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717"
to Google search.
By golly, that's right. Canon scanner software had indeed installed those dumb login items. I've removed them.
ReplyDelete"The previous was obtained by typing "matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717" to Google search."
ReplyDeleteGood thinking.
It amazes me to see how careless some vendors are about testing their software. Throughout the years, many have made it to my blacklist, and most notably Creative Labs.
I mean, their drivers always were flaky, but at some point they managed to release a version of their mixer software for the Audigy sound board that encoded all the mixer settings into the name of a file, which file was obviously stored in a system folder.
As a result, if you had too many features enabled on the mixer, it would end up creating a file with an illegal name in that system folder. Which file could obviously not be deleted, since its name was illegal. But that didn't stop their crappy software from creating a new file every time you would change a setting on the mixer. A real mess to clean up, if your system survived. That was the last time I installed (or bought, for that matter) anything from them.
I sure wish there would be a way to make those people accountable for all the time they have us waste. One programmer botches the job, thousands of users each end up wasting countless hours trying to figure it out. Talk about an amplifier!
"Gobbledegook"? That's the first time I hear about THAT programming language! :o)
ReplyDelete"their drivers always were flaky, but at some point they managed to release a version of their mixer software for the Audigy sound board that encoded all the mixer settings into the name of a file"
How about putting it all in a bloody .TXT file? Is that too complicated for a professional informatician to come up with?
I've looked up "flaky" in my Harraps English/French dictionary. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that WASN'T a compliment! ;-P
A little bird whispered to me that maybe, just maybe, those egg-head programmers often have pent-up frustration issues with their bosses, and that there just miiiiight be a relation...
Oh, and speaking of flaky error messages, I love this other classic: "this computer/application has just performed an illegal operation and will now shut down".
And you can just picture the poor user going, "WHAAAAT? Hey! I wasn't downloading any pirated music or doing anything against the law! WTF you SOB PC?"
No wonder computering can be stressful, if they cast at you words like "illegal" all the time. MAD Magazine once did a piece called "What Star Trek would be like if their technology worked like the REAL one". For instance, if the last person to use the teleporter was like your colleagues messing with the settings of the copying machine at work, you could expect to change skin tones often, and end up upside-down or splinched.
Would YOU trust a real-life computer software to teleport your precioussss moleculessss correctly?
"I sure wish there would be a way to make those people accountable for all the time they have us waste."
In the USA? Just gather a large number of upset customers, and file a class-action lawsuit!
Sheesh! Does a lebanese hick have to tell you everything?