I Hate OS X

R

robchristianson

Registered
Maybe someone can shed some light on this...

I installed OS 10.2.3 from the CD (some of you may have read my horror stories about that...) Well, it's finally working semi-stable. yesterday I had no end of troubles with running Photoshop 5.5 in classic (my co. is too cheap to upgrade our photoshops yet) - one time i was printing and the machine froze so hard i couldnt forcequit classic or photoshop or even go back to 10 - when i manually restarted, the system folders on my HD were corrupted and i had to reinstall 10.2.3 again.

My outlook express and Classic itself quits without telling me it's going to 50% of the time.

Whenever I upgrade to 10.2.6 (or now, 10.2.8) if I try to startup GoLive or MSN messenger, they spontaneously quit right after starting up (App. "x" has unexpectedly quit).

Has anyone had similar frustrations? (Now I find out my Wacom Tablet (adb) would not work even with a USB adapter). I am totally thinking about going back to 9.2.2... nothing was new but at least everything worked.

Please help, somebody, to shed some light on my problems?

I have a blue/white G3 350mhz that had a brain transplant and is now a 550mhz g4 OWC monster.
 
Brain transplant eh? That's probably your problem if you did it yourself.

But in reality you should just upgrade your apps. Adobe upgrades are actually farely cheap ($100 for a set last time I checked) and if you're a student you can get them for around $50-$75. All I can say is upgrade...not only will it help with your problems but you'll have a lot more power at your fingertips as well.

Good luck!
 
Yeah I know - but the thing is, I'm a staff designer here, and the company has to make that call. We just upgraded all our computers to OS X, ram upgrades, HD upgrades, etc. Photoshop is the next on the list, but I am not holding my breath. It takes a while for the management to see the justification for upgrading when as they see it "we're just fine with what we got"...

I did get the idea that maybe it's a font issue, so I had ATM sweep my library of fonts, and I just deleted about 30 corrupted ones. Hope that will help some.

thanks for the note!
 
keep in mind that to revert to OS 9.2 is only a temporary fix. Since so many apps and peripherals are designed for optimization under OSX, and some will not operate at all in OS 9, it behooves you to bite the proverbial bullet and move to OSX...especially now with Panther on the way. In my graphics/pre-press company, we've been shifting very slowly to OS X due to the massive commitment to peripherals and apps that run poorly or not at all in Classic. Font management and user folder structures are very different in OSX, but more efficient when you get used to using them. In a corporate environment, it makes sense if at least 1 person acts as IT 'point' to troubleshoot the transition from OS 9 to X...and perhaps moving one machine at a time to X will make more sense. Read the posts on this forum and start picking up Mac mags...you've probably noticed that they don't bother with OS 9 tips anymore. Also keep in mind that Classic is not OS 9.2, it's sort of a simulacrum of it running under the OSX architecture.

and you are correct, your ADB tablet will be just a glorified paperweight in OSX.
You've got to replace it; there's no workaround to this- I feel your pain, as I had a 6"x8" and a 12"x12" ArtZII that I used and loved for years...
 
what OS version did you updated from before 10.2.3?

I would have recommended doing a clean install upgrading to OS X. When I got my first mac 3 years ago, it ran 9.1 I think - back when OS X was still a rumor and around the corner. I had problems with stability that turned out to be partly because a hard drive problem. I didn't do a clean install in the beginning and some files got corrupted which caused problems down the line. Oh, and when you reinstalled the OS, did you use the disk utility to check if there were any problems with the HD?

Also, did you try reinstalling photoshop and other unstable applications? Perhaps it's OS 9.2.2 that's unstable since Classic has to operate within OS X.

My powermac at home has rarely crashed - once in many many months.
 
I have consulted on this issue quite a lot with designers and design firms. I have been recommending over the last few years not to move to Mac OS X until at least 75% of your apps can run native and you have made sure 100% of your hardware either works or you have in place work-a-rounds.

Before a few weeks ago this wasn't much of a problem. If you used mainly Adobe apps. Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, GoLive 6, LiveMotion 2 and InDesign 2 all ran in both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (and before Adobe upgraded to 6, Acrobat 5 worked in both operating systems). Other apps like Suitcase 10, FreeHand, Dreamweaver, Flash and others also ran in both for a while. By getting these upgrades over the last few years most of my clients prepared for Mac OS X while still working productively in Mac OS 9.

In the end, when they did start moving, usually the only apps that they ran in Classic were QuarkXPress and Distiller.

Running Mac OS X before you have your software and hardware ready is always going to be a painful period.

Mac OS X v10.1 was released on September 29, 2001. Two years have past since most of the major apps would run in both 9 and X in a productive way. Adobe, Quark and others have started releasing apps that now only run in Mac OS X.

I strongly suggest getting some of your primary apps upgraded. I even more strongly suggest that you get versions that run in both 9 and X (for the times when other apps you haven't upgrade force you back into 9).

Mac OS X is a wonderful operating system to work in... when you have the apps you need to work in it. When you have to do everything in Classic it can feel very much like typing with boxing gloves.

Move back to Mac OS 9, figure out the hardware issues, figure out where to find upgrades that let you make a smooth transition.

Everyone who I've moved to Mac OS X this way has loved it from the start. Most of the people who tried it the way you seem to be doing it hate it with a passion. Please, help yourself to enjoy (not hate) Mac OS X. Be prepared.
 
I've got a small point to make here -- I worked with some friends at a small graphic design firm, and using our applications in the Classic environment instead of in OS 9 was a life-saver. MUCH more stable we found than actually booting into OS 9 and running our apps that way.
 
I'd just like to add that the symptoms described sound like there's a hardware issue underneath all of this. It could be RAM, HD, or IDE bus, they all can show up very much like this. Hell, even a totally flaky video card can produce symptoms like this. I'd swap the HD into another box and see where the symptoms go. Or do the install on an external FW drive and see how that works.

In general, I always suspect the hard drive. They keep getting bigger, faster, cheaper, smaller, and less reliable over time. They also seem to be really good at giving infrequent errors so that they can pass diagnostic tests but still eat your data.

But hey, that's just me. I only do this stuff for a living right now. ... I like my job.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top