Screen of Death..

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Hey guys,

I don't want to become one of these people who goes out of their way delight in M$s/PC failings at every opportunity.... but again today- I have proof of the need to get outta this windows....

One of the great mysteries of the universe to me... the Blue screen of death! Twice today - whilst working away as normal, I have been presented with the blue screen which kills my pc...

Can anyone re-assure me that when I switch - there is no such thing as a blue screen of death on the Mac??

thanks :Grimmace:
 
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Its actually green :)

I have not experienced any thing similar to what your talking about and I switched in September. However that does not mean it doesnt happen.
 
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If a Mac program fails, you just force quit that application. It very rarely, if ever, brings down the rest of the computer.

I've never seen a Mac freeze or just restart of its own accord personally.

The only thing really that affects Macs are kernel panics and they are virtually always the fault of faulty memory or hardware. Again, I've never seen a kernel panic personally.
 
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did anyone ever see that episode of sex & the city when carrie's boyfriend kills her mac laptop? i've always wondered if that episode was at all accurate. like a big sad face with a tongue hanging out appears when you hit ctrl+alt+delete. haha.

i'm buying an iMac and giving up my very loud fanned, high pitched ear bleed causing, wires everywhere, hard drive hanging out of the tower pc this week.
 
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The only comparable thing I've experienced is a kernel panic, and I saw that happen ONCE. I bought my iMac in November 2005.
 
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The only thing really that affects Macs are kernel panics and they are virtually always the fault of faulty memory or hardware.

That's what generally causes blues screens.
 
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I experience BSOD on my Windows machine when I have too many applications running at one time. It now happens when I have Winamp playing and when I'm surfing the net with Firefox. I hate that machine but it's something I have to deal with until I get my mac in November. :[
 
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well as a new Mac user ( 1 month now) I can tell you that so far I have only managed to crash iphoto and one other program once, due to my lack of knowledge in trying something that the program simply would not do.
But I can happily report that the Mac Os DID NOT CRASH! As a matter of fact most of the time it asked me if I wanted it to restart the program!
A world of difference!
The funny thing is that last night while I was using Win xp in parallels, Win xp had a huge hissy when I tried to start 2 programs at the same time (something I do with the imac all the time) and xp blue screened!
Parallels promptly shut it self down and restarted again!
Mac Os kept humming along just fine! Although I swear I hear the imac chuckle!
Seriously I have been a windows fan boy since v3.1 many years now and the Mac and its Os is just amazing and so far ahead of win xp (and I suspect vista) that xp feels old.
I have not missed my pc at all, not even one day!
You will have to relearn to do quite a few things again! (Don’t let anybody fool you) but it took me all of a day to figure out the basics and a week to fell quite comfortable.
Now a month out im a very satisfied imac user and probably will be for a long, long time.
 
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os x is by far a more stable os than XP
 
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Its actually green :)

I have not experienced any thing similar to what your talking about and I switched in September. However that does not mean it doesnt happen.

Actually, it's Grey.

I've experienced Kernel Panics in the past (had a few this week in fact) but was able to fix them fairly easily. They don't happen often, and when they do, you know there is something seriously wrong with your system or hardware. This week, I simply had to mount my Quads boot drive on my iBooks desktop via firewire (the Quad would GSOD when booting from the DVD) and run disc utility. Disc utility fixed it and the Quad is fine and boots from the DVD with no issues now. All in all it took me 15 minutes of troubleshooting to get it fixed and back up, no software reinstall required.
 
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BSOD does exist in Mac OS X, but is usually rear. This can happen to all computers.

I can think of four variations I've seen over the years of OS X's life. First is the freeze. The cursor may be movable, but nothing else works. On some occasions it will come back to life, so in those cases something is taxing the system more than it should be. If the cursor is movable, I try to have some patience for a few minutes. Second is where the system gets so upset, that it dims the screen and tells you to press and hold the power button to cause a reboot. EyeTV has caused this a lot recently since their update. Third is what is closest to the the Windows BSOD, and I have seen it as a blue screen with little information. Lastly, I've seen the system panic, scroll a bunch of text that eventually leaves me at some low level prompt. Actually now that I think of it, it might have been part of number three.

Excepting the EyeTV issue I'm currently having, the last time I remember my tower having a crash was a couple of years ago because of faulty firewire cable. I may have had a few other panics since then, but they are not memorable. I'll try downgrading EyeTv.

My MBP laptop recently froze about a week ago and I wasn't doing anything special. Just browsing the internet, so I'm puzzled about that one incident. I suspect over heating.

So in closing, no one can assure you that the problem will not hit you if you switch to Mac. The concensus does seem to be that Macs have much fewer incidents of a serious crashing problem.

P.S. Any system that crashes needs some debugging time.
 
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I've had five kernel panics on my Macbook since I bought it, but haven't had any in quite awhile, so whatever it was that caused them seems to have mysteriously fixed them. Most of them happened when I was out and about with it. One happened right after I stuck a USB thumbdrive in, but the rest kind of happened just out of nowhere. None since, though, fingers crossed.

I've had one freeze; the type described where mouse cursor moves, but nothing responds. No chance to force-quit, and I'm pretty sure that when I pinged it from another machine there was no response. Had to power-button it. None since then though.

The other thing that can happen is Finder can go wonky. I can pretty much make it happen if I put my Macbook to sleep while my external firewire drive is connected and mounted. My external drive doesn't seem to cope very well with the Mac it's connected to going to sleep. When it wakes up and I try to do any kind of file operation (double click a folder, for example) Finder will lock-up as if it's waiting for an I/O from the external drive. You can't force-quit it to relaunch either as neither the Apple menu will respond, nor can you launch Activity Monitor since you can't get to it (though I do now have AM on my Dock...be curious to see if I could do it that way, but I don't want to risk my 200+ gig of data on that drive to experiment.) Thought I needed to reboot, but on a lark I disconnected the external drive. Finder started responding, initially by complaining that you disconnected a device without unmounting it, which of course you shouldn't but then Finder was back to normal. Fortunately when I plugged it back in whatever checks file system integrity (fsck?) fixed any issues there might have been with the external drive and mounted it back up.

So be sure you eject and disconnect (or at least just eject) any firewire external drives before you put a Mac to sleep or Finder might get confused in a bad way.
 
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stoldie
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Thanks for the replies guys, I get the impression that OS X is going to be a world away from my windows days... Can't believe Ive waited so long. I am still aware that there may be issues with a mac which may lie ahead - but I am confident that my new OS life is going to be far more enjoyable!!

keep up the great work...
 
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stoldie
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Yeah!.... I am very new to the world of mac - can anyone explain what a kernel panic is??

:eek:

:Smirk:
 
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My Macbook crashed, froze and wouldn't start up after an update recently and I needed to reinstall the OS. That said, I have since been informed that you should leave your Mac alone while it updates. I obviously didn't.
 
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wow neg rep for my comment, sad...

a kernel panic will require you to manually restart your mac. it will be a black box telling you to restart in 5 or 6 different languages.

here:
images


edit: well, i did not see the second page here so now i feel dumb :/
 
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did anyone ever see that episode of sex & the city when carrie's boyfriend kills her mac laptop? i've always wondered if that episode was at all accurate. like a big sad face with a tongue hanging out appears when you hit ctrl+alt+delete. haha.

that sad face is called the Sad Mac. it was used to indicate that OS X cannot be booted.

Before OS X 10.3, a Happy Mac would appear upon succesful booting. now, it just shows a grey Apple logo. No Mac icon.
 

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