I am the proud owner of a Apple G5 PPC with a 23″ Cinema Display. My pride is, howvere, somehwat diminished as the machine occasionally misbehaves in a really irritating manner and, way beyond irritating, has recently started crashing frequently.
The misbehavior is mostly on startup and has been an issue since I got the machine although it has got worse recently. The problem is this: The screen will show the desktop for a split second then go black, then show the desktop again, and then blank again, and so on until it finally gets bored with this routine and stays on. Now for the crashing. It appears that if I leave iTunes running for a some time playing music — anything from ten seconds to six hours — and there’s nothing else but Finder running than I get a crash (you know, the one where the screen dims and a black box with white writing is shown that says to turn off). I’ve also seen iPhoto crash the system several times but not repeatably. I just ran Disk Utility which found a couple of files with illegal names so we’ll see what happens. What I can’t figure out is why I keep reading comments such as “my Mac has been running continuously for 112 years and never crashed” yet mine is misbehaving with wild abandon. Do I just beat my computers up more than other people do? The issue of whether Mac hardware and OS X is really a major improvement on other OSes came to my attention when I first got the Mac. I wrote about the bad bahavior of iPhoto in Backspin last year. I now believe that OS X is better in many ways but I still question how robust it really is. Bottom line, it is better than Windows. And I think I’m still disappointed …
