Macintosh Myths.

[Directed]

I've heard the whole macs do not freeze up, you don't have to restart a mac, and how things just work. In my experience Apple Macs OS 10.4 SUCK as a networking operating system. They are unweildy when logging off, requiring end user clicking on boxes after it looks like the logout is done and not automatically saving and shutting down programs in the logout or shutdown process.

WHen you instigate a shutdown, is it that hard to autosave existing files then autoclose all open applications? Do I really need to click 5 checkboxes? My god that feature is ANNOYING.

Also why does my computer freeze up regularly when using Adobe CS2 and working with pictures. That is getting me REALLY ANNOYED.

And don't get me started about the crappy way that is network prints. What a disaster. Don't tell me that apple computers are better in their OS than XP. This is only true if you don't want to network the piece of crap. That is all.

[Lina]

Actually, as a designer I like the feature of asking me if I want to save applications before shutting down/restarting. It allows me to quickly review what it was I was working on and make sure it's the correct version. I have a somewhat chaotic way of designing and I like this little safety net.

I've worked heavily on both Mac OS and Xp with CS2. My god, the stability issues I've had with CS2 and XP. Ya don't want to get me started.

But it's a big fat myth that Mac OS doesn't freeze up once in a while...good lord, who told you that one?

[pinchy]

^ as a highjack, Lina's design work is pretty good. We employed her to do a corporate logo which kicks arse.

[Lina]

I paid him to say that.

No wait, he paid me :D

[-=[BB]=-]

Yep, its a myth that macs dont freeze or crash, I have had good kernel panics in my time using OS X :)
But have had much more system instability when using Windows.

[Directed]

While using Windows XP my computer has crashed while using Adobe CS2 a total of 1 time, and that was because I went crazy with the layers.

While using OSX.4, and Adobe CS2, the app has crashed once or twice a day. And I have 2 gigs of ram so there is no excuse. IN general I prefer OS X.4 for work as long as it does not involve networking. Apples suck at networking: network printing, network sharing, etc.

[Mr. Bungle]

i just bought a macbook pro and so far i am liking it a lot. i have yet to put it through the rigors of CS2 and some other RAM intensive programs, but so far this is a nice cpu.

oh, and I have been a PC user since 1994 who regularly mocked Macs. I am not a mindless Mac fanboy.

[kleph]

i'm still mulling the possibility of making the switch. my renewed emphasis on image work and the headaches of xp have me looking at apple with a more forgiving eye. and my brother-in-law is as persistant as a mormon amway salesman in shilling for them.

my biggest concern is cost and availability. being in peru there is a single apple store in lima but a whole section of town for legal and not-so-legal windows and pc stuff. and mail-order is a bigger beaurecratic nightmare than you can possibly imagine.

so i'll give xp antother nine to 12 months and reasses the situation when i'm back stateside. the plan is to have this laptop down there as the backup and a macbook as the main computer. if that fails, i go vista and stick with bill for another few years.

[Fuzzy Dice]

i just bought a macbook pro and so far i am liking it a lot. i have yet to put it through the rigors of CS2 and some other RAM intensive programs, but so far this is a nice cpu.

oh, and I have been a PC user since 1994 who regularly mocked Macs. I am not a mindless Mac fanboy.

This is the same boat I was in last year.

I bought a Powerbook and almost immediately liked os x better than windows. Almost immediately. It did take some getting used to. Its more straightforward, and generally easier to navigate. I use CS2 on a regular basis, have for months, and have yet to have it crash on me, which is not to say that I've never had any programs crash. Of course it happens, it's a computer. But it happens a lot less than it ever used to on windows. I hate it when people go all mac fanboy - Macs are not perfect machines by any stretch, and the tech support can be loathsome. I simply find OS X far less frustrating to use than any iteration of windows.

I've also had better overall success in terms of networking. Macs find other macs right away, macs find PCs on the network right away. PCs tend not to find macs right away, which is a bit of a problem at times. Network printing is a bit of a pain to set up, I'll give you that. But I've got my lappie set up to use all the different printers at my uni and it hasn't stuffed it up yet.

[Directed]

I like Macs, probably the reason why my computer crashes is that I am a very demanding user when it comes to graphics, and will have indesign and photoshop open at the same time while putting a rather large publication together. Probably a lot of my problems will go away when I no longer have to use Rosetta for my CS2 suite. When I upgrade to CS3 I will update you all on it.

For personal use, I love the macs if its work related. What I do not like is their networking and network printing (through servers) and the instability problems I am experiencing. Almost every instability problem in XP can be traced to User error or hardware problems. But on the Macs this is par for the course for now. Its not completely unusable, its just annoying. My applications never lose any of their work at least.

But I friggin hate the stupid are you sure? dialogue boxes. Just autosave the file and close the damn program already. There has to be a setting for that somewhere.

[metalhed00]

I do alot of multi-tasking which eats up RAM and sometimes "overloads" which cause program crashes. I know there's programs you can purchase to help doing more than one thing at a time, but I think most MACs work pretty well if properly maintained.

I think the problem most people have is they crap their computers up. I'm big on organzing not only my files, but also how I open my programs and in which way I work with them. I also restart my computer atleast once (sometimes twice) in a typical work day (10 hours) just to get the system "fresh" again. Little 3 minute things like that make your work day much easier.

The network connections can sometimes be a problem, but its not that big of a deal. Simple restart of the router usually fixes the problem and allows to me to get another cup of coffee.

Printing is pretty good provided you have a pretty good printer with a good memory chip in it. Its the people who stick their fingers in the printer thinking they know how to unjam a printer that fuck everything up.

I don't think I have ever frozen using OS X, but I would freeze quite a bit using OS 9. However, where I work has yet to upgrade to CS2 and currently use CS1. Unfortunately we still use Quark 6 and work will not put fundings in to upgrade to 7… cheap basturds.

Those are my opinions on this topic of MACs. I never use Auto Save as I don't trust it and, as Lina said, I can get one last look at the work to see if its saveable. (Is that a word?)

[lostreality]

I paid him to say that.

No wait, he paid me :D

what else can i pay you for?

[Glompbot]

While using Windows XP my computer has crashed while using Adobe CS2 a total of 1 time, and that was because I went crazy with the layers.

While using OSX.4, and Adobe CS2, the app has crashed once or twice a day. And I have 2 gigs of ram so there is no excuse. IN general I prefer OS X.4 for work as long as it does not involve networking. Apples suck at networking: network printing, network sharing, etc.

I believe we discussed this before mang. (http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf) Stop blaming the mac when it is Adobes problem.


Network printing is easy, its obviously a PEBKAC error. Same with network sharing.

http://www.apple.com/support/
and
http://www.macwindows.com/

have fun.

The ONLY applications I have had freeze on my mac, are safari running in rosetta because adobe flash doesn't play so nice yet, and iserialz- which is in beta for being a universal binary.

Apart from that, it is still a superior operating system... and I only get one question prior to shut down, so I'm putting that down to it being a PEBKAC error on your part again.

[Glompbot]

But I friggin hate the stupid are you sure? dialogue boxes. Just autosave the file and close the damn program already. There has to be a setting for that somewhere.

Again, what application is it in? if its in adobe, blame the adobe creators, because thats not necissarly a mac thing.

[Glompbot]

i just bought a macbook pro and so far i am liking it a lot. i have yet to put it through the rigors of CS2 and some other RAM intensive programs, but so far this is a nice cpu.

oh, and I have been a PC user since 1994 who regularly mocked Macs. I am not a mindless Mac fanboy.

cs3 comes out in a few months, I advise waiting:

http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf

[Directed]

Apart from that, it is still a superior operating system... and I only get one question prior to shut down, so I'm putting that down to it being a PEBKAC error on your part again.

While it would be nice if it was my pebkac, this problem doesn't occur to me as much as it appears to the 50 users I have to keep up with. When someone doesn't specifically close programs running in Rosetta, it gums up the shutdown process for unknown reasons. Then a bunch of user dialogues pop up which must be responded to. When there are 50 PEBKACs in a row, the problem moves from PEBKAC to PEBCAOS (problem exists between computer and the OS.

Unless you have a nice MAC way to resolve this. IF you do Sapia, I will plus rep you and create a B+R thread about how Sapia rocks on MAcs and I am jealous.

[Glompbot]

Quit applications prior to shutdown
Something any windows user should already have ingrained in their habits, and mac mail has always canceled shutdown, so any mac user should have it as a habit as well.

[Directed]

OK, you aren't understanding me. All of my end users don't always quit all of their applications. They feel that if you press the red x and the window disappears the application is quit. This is not the case in macs. The window may go away, but the application is still running in the background. And the computer will not shut down unless you find all those stupid programs and get them all to stop. Why this is a good feature I don't understand.

Every windows user is used to close the window, and the application closes. Was I not clear this is for 50+ users at a time and not necessarily a personal situation? Although personally I still find it annoying when it happens to me as well. I'd like to get a nice shutdown feature that autosaves everything and exits out of the OS.

[Glompbot]

Command q

teach them.

[Directed]

I'd be happy if I could teach them that the power button turns the damn computer on when they sit down in front of it and see a black screen. I don't deal with Einsteins. They are nice enough people, I just have to hand-hold a little more than I would like. While we are on features on macs I find annoying, I would so like the printing cache to go away on shutdown as well. This one girl printed like 100 pictures of herself on one computer, and it took me 30 minutes to figure out restarting the computer won't make the printing go away.

[Lina]

It'd be pretty bloody irratating to try to re-teach people their work methods. My brain is programmed to command q outta programs and automatically command s about once every five minutes so it doesn't seem like such an issue to me.

You probably weren't asking about this one but if you hate the actual dialog box that pops up when you select restart/shutdown you can avoid that by holding down the option key. Pressing control/option/command/eject will shut it down without the dialog box too...from memory...

[Glompbot]

If they're imacs do the following:
White board marker, write on big area under base of screen

"do this to quit" "do this prior to shutdown"

its worked in more than one environment.

[Glompbot]

Personally, I restart my mac only once every blue moon, usually when there is an update... so I like the fact applications don't quit...
because I compulsively close windows...

[vladi]

And the computer will not shut down unless you find all those stupid programs and get them all to stop. Why this is a good feature I don't understand.


This is really stupid. Infact I am blown away by how stupid this is. Strangely I never had to shutdown a Mac before, I suppose I only ever used Uni ones back in first year though.

[-=[BB]=-]

If they're imacs do the following:
White board marker, write on big area under base of screen

"do this to quit" "do this prior to shutdown"

its worked in more than one environment.

Just write a simple applescript to kill all the programs then shutdown, place it in the dock or on the desktop and get the users to run that when they want to shut down. simple.

[-=[BB]=-]

speaking of applescripts it used to be a fun thing to piss people off in the pre OSX days, write a script to shutdown then place it in the startup items folder :) every time the user starts the computer, the script runs and shuts it down, hours of fun all round :D

[Lina]

And the computer will not shut down unless you find all those stupid programs and get them all to stop. Why this is a good feature I don't understand.

I've never experienced this, to be honest. Unless I have an open unsaved document in a program if I go through shutdown it'll automatically cycle through and shut all programs itself without a problem. If I do have an open unsaved document it asks me if I want to save it, pretty standard really.

=-;1117089']Just write a simple applescript to kill all the programs then shutdown, place it in the dock or on the desktop and get the users to run that when they want to shut down. simple.

Even if you write an apple script it'll still bring up dialog boxes to ask if you want to save if you have an open unsaved doc, which was the original topic...but apart from that apple script may help with Directeds other issues...

[Directed]

I must of screwed up some setting when setting up all the Imacs. My personal imac has no problem. It only happens in imacs with multiple accounts on them.

[Glompbot]

Screenshot the dialogue boxes, screenshot what is happening, give us full details... chuck it in a new thread with an appropriate title.. i'll ask some of my mac friends and try to fix it too.

[Scumbag]

Directed, are you using CS2 on an intel mac ?

If so, you do realise that its going to run in emulation mode & cause a whole host of problems dont you ?

[Lina]

I thought there were only issues installing - and only if you install Version Cue with CS2?

Actually, just read some stuff on the Adobe forums. Some people are having issues with CS2 programs running under Rosetta. CS3 will be a true universal application, apparently.

[Directed]

Adobe CS2 runs fine under Rosetta, albeit slow until you really start using your memory. When you use CS2, and Bridge and Indesign together that's when things don't work so well.

[Glompbot]

Adobe CS2 runs fine under Rosetta, albeit slow until you really start using your memory. When you use CS2, and Bridge and Indesign together that's when things don't work so well.

it runs, but it is in no way supported, and that is the case for a reason. you have no right to complain about instability if you use software that is not recommended nor supported.... by BOTH manufacturers (apple and adobe)

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING LINK ALREADY (http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf)

[Lina]

geez Louise, take it easy!

[Colonel Kurtz]

MacIntosh Myth: Macs are cool

How fucking cool can tehy be if tehy can't play my fucking games?

[Lina]

Hello! Welcome to 2007, my name is Lina, I'll be your host for today.

[Glompbot]

http://www.apple.com/games/trailers/

orly

Civ, AOE, BF1942, COD, B&W, Doom, Diablo, all the blizzard games usually run on macs, Most of the myst games, NWN, Prey, all of the quakes, the star wars games, UT.
games that don't run under the mac os can easily be run on apple hardware under the windows os, or even under parallels

[DumHed]

I went to the big mac shop in New York City.
It has a giant glass cube and giant glass stairs.
The shop is full of macs, ipods, mac people, and ipod people.

I left after a short time due to a lack of excitement :P
The toy store with a life sized woolly mammoth stuffed toy was cooler.

[locust]

Shutdown isn't supposed to be a quick, so-maybe-you'll-lose-work process.

If you want something quick, suspend the machine. It's a Mac, so suspend and resume actually works.

[Colonel Kurtz]

games that don't run under the mac os can easily be run on apple hardware under the windows os, or even under parallels
So why get a Mac then, are you saying the hardware is better then?

[Ins0mniac]

I believe we discussed this before mang. (http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf) Stop blaming the mac when it is Adobes problem.

Windows gets that a lot too. You get a crappy program or piece of hardware causing problems and the user always blames the O.S. Having said that, an O.S should be durable enough to not lock up even when the problem is NOT it's fault. At worst it should dump you out of the program in question.

[Glompbot]

So why get a Mac then, are you saying the hardware is better then?
i would never defile my mac with windows... i was offering it as an option because some people feel that the apple computers are very inflexible when this is no longer the case.

[Colonel Kurtz]

I actually have no beef with macs and what they are designed for. They tend to do it well and reliably, and in a stylish manner too, with an intuitive OS

The two things that kep me off macs are
1) can't play with the hardware (at least you used no to be able to, not sure now)
2) I have very old games which i still play, a lot of DOS / W95 so I still need a PC.

The other side of this coin is I'M NOT GETTING FUCKING VISTA EITHER, because it is a stinking lump of pretty shit

[Glompbot]

I actually have no beef with macs and what they are designed for. They tend to do it well and reliably, and in a stylish manner too, with an intuitive OS

The two things that kep me off macs are
1) can't play with the hardware (at least you used no to be able to, not sure now)
2) I have very old games which i still play, a lot of DOS / W95 so I still need a PC.

The other side of this coin is I'M NOT GETTING FUCKING VISTA EITHER, because it is a stinking lump of pretty shit
http://www.parallels.com/ is your answer

and if you get a mac pro you can play with it as you like... except the cpu.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/expansion.html

[Colonel Kurtz]

what, spend more money?!?!?!?

heh

Thanks for the solutions though, mac might be capable after all

[astro]

I like OSX. It's pretty, it works, and it's based on Unix. Yes, it has a few bugs, but I challenge anyone to find an OS that doesn't. I think some people go a little far with it, though. It is only an OS after all, not some kind of recipe for eternal life.

So, anyhoo, I like OSX. I used to have a dual G4 which was fun to play with.

But for me to run OSX I'd have to buy a whole new Mac. As I'm a gamer it'd have to be a Powermac so I can have a honkin' big video card. Even if I spec the system up as a really basic rig, it'll cost me $4200 to upgrade. And that's with 2x2Ghz Xeons, 2Gb of ram and 160Gb of HDD space. Not a huge system by any means. Oh, and it's also without a monitor. For the same price I could get a monster IBM Compatible system and a nice LCD monitor to replace my aging CRT.

So, no. I won't be using OSX any time soon because paying $4200 just so I can run an Operating System is pretty crazy. Unless, of course, apple decide to smash the market by releasing OSX to run on IBM compatible PCs. Which i'm guessing won't happen, unfortunately.

[Mr. Bungle]

i am happy with my mac

[Dr.P]

and if you get a mac pro you can play with it as you like... except the cpu.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/expansion.html

Who says you can't do anything with the cpu.

How about 8 cores?
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

It's just the lappies that have soldered processors. All the other macs can have their cpus upgraded. (I think)

[Glompbot]

quotes in what way? i'm betting pebcak

[Nimmers]

Ive had my new macbook for 3 weeks and had my first BSOD today running bootcamp and Windows :)

I have one of those wetsuit sleeves for it which it was sitting on that and I suspect it might have been blocking the fan though.

[lowededwookie]

IN general I prefer OS X.4 for work as long as it does not involve networking. Apples suck at networking: network printing, network sharing, etc.In general I have the exact opposite. The Macs network brilliantly and the Windows ones suck. Of course when you're running a Mac network trying to get Windows machines connecting to it, Windows being Windows doesn't like to play nice.

That being said I've never had problems networking my Macs to Windows networks at all. Hell, I've never even had problems connecting my Mac to a Windows VPN. The only problem with printing I have is that there doesn't seem to be a good driver for the Xerox Document Centre 405 which is a piece of crap anyway.

What you've failed to mention is whether or not you are running CS2 on an Intel Mac or a PPC one. I think most of your issues if you're running it on an Intel will be caused by Rosetta. While this is a Tiger issue of sorts Sapia is right that you should really blame Adobe because it's taken them this fucking long to write an Intel version.

As for the shutting down bit. Most apps will close down by themselves when shutting down. There are two issues that will prevent them from letting MacOS X shut down.

1). Unsaved data. The fact that you find the OS won't let you shutdown if there is unsaved data to be a problem probably says more about you than the OS. Windows does the same thing so I fail to see how you can blame MacOS X for this. It's a safety thing. If you're shutting down then you should save all your work first anyway so I fail to see your problem here.

2). A program has crashed. While not a MacOS X thing per se it will become evident when you go to shutdown. There are some programs you don't want running when you shutdown (mainly things like DiskUtility or other power utils that can cause big issues if they are running when you try to shutdown) so it makes sense to close these before hand.

But the real kicker that Windoze users find is that when they close a window it doesn't close the app. This has always thrown Windows users but you have to remember that MacOS X is designed for productivity.

When you open a number of Windows windows you are actually opening another copy of that Windows application. For example, when you open two Word documents you actually open two copies of Word. However on the Mac when you open two documents you actually only open another window but you only run one copy of the application. This is why when you close all the windows the application still remains open. This is way better for the machine than the Windows way because you can run more copies of a program with fewer resources. You don't need a million Gigabytes of RAM to run Windows apps because you aren't running a million copies of the same program, you're only running a million copies of a window. As the application has already taken the resources it needs to run the system is only doing redraws of the window for each window. It's much more resource friendly and why MacOS X runs faster with similar specs to a Windows machine.

Simply tell your users to press "Apple Q" and this will close the application down. It's quicker than going "<program name>/Quit".

[Craft]

Basically, anytime you are using emulation like you are with CS2, you are at a greater risk of crashing. I've had my fair share of crashes with my Macbook Pro. But 90% of the time that is because i was running Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or any other program in emulation.

Has anybody other than me enjoyed a total system kernl panic? Those are really fun.

[lowededwookie]

Has anybody other than me enjoyed a total system kernl panic? Those are really fun.I've had a couple but only with non-Apple software. I have yet to experience it as a result of hardware though.

[Decadent Blonde]

I have a question. I recently bought a Mac Pro and I upgraded by adding a 500GB internal hard drive for more file storage space. I installed it myself and when i boot the computer it gives an error box saying the system doesn't recognize the disk. Does anyone know how I can fix this?

I know this is off topic for this thread but I can't post a new thread yet :-) thanks!

[dozer]

I have a question. I recently bought a Mac Pro and I upgraded by adding a 500GB internal hard drive for more file storage space. I installed it myself and when i boot the computer it gives an error box saying the system doesn't recognize the disk. Does anyone know how I can fix this?

I know this is off topic for this thread but I can't post a new thread yet :-) thanks!

run disk utility from the osx install dvd.

[Decadent Blonde]

OK thanks! I'll give that a try.

[Lina]

I've never networked macs before until last weekend. It was easy pie and I was excited.

[Veeedka]

I've never networked macs before until last weekend. It was easy pie and I was excited.


You were networking OSX machines?

Mac networking isn't really much of an issue now, but back in the days of OS7-9 and Appletalk, there were issues :P Oh, were there issues...

[Glompbot]

mac to mac is hot stuff

[Directed]

The issues in networking only pop up when you have 50+ macs and stupid users having multiple accounts on multiple machines. Then there are issues. Oh yes, there are issues. Under Rosetta you cannot switch users and have other programs use Rosetta. (scenario: A user uses Microsoft word that runs on rosetta. The User switches to another user without fully logging out. The next user then cannot use microsoft word and declares that the computer doesn't work) I hate that.

Say what you want about users shouldn't do that or whatever, but with pc's you don't have this issue. Not that I don't like macs, they have their strengths. Multiple user accounts on the same machine in typical end-user settings are not one of them. Also print jobs that try to go through and fail sit in the queue forever. I hate that.

[Colonel Kurtz]

Mac myth: Mac users are just too cool for PCs

[dozer]

Mac myth: Mac users are cool

fixed