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OSX Blues II

After losing another 48 hours to the perplexing misbehavior of OS X 10.2.1 Jaguar, we find that it is unusable on our dual processor G4 and we will have to content ourselves with OS 9 until we buy our next Mac.

We gave it our best shot. Dropped wads of dough on OS X compatible software upgrades. Spent hours tinkering with preferences, moving files and folders, downloading and configuring OS X browsers and other applications, and learning the ins and outs of window and file management under the new OS.

We updated DragThing, Euroda, Transmit, Fetch, Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 7, Tex-Edit Plus, Typeit4Me, PageSpinner, and Photoshop 7. We installed Chimera (lovely) and Opera 5 for OS X (needs work). Created keyboard macros and custom shortcuts. We learned to appreciate Column Views, Dock popups, and other OS X niceties. Began to think today was the day we’d start working excusively in Apple’s new operating system.

We nearly made it.

Then, like outnumbered combatants, one application after another began unexpectedly quitting. Poof, poof, poof. Down went Photoshop, DragThing, Mozilla, Transmit.

No harm done, we thought. Having read David Pogue’s Mac OS X: The Missing Manual twice from cover to cover before touching OS X, we knew that applications can quit in X without harming or destabilizing the operating system. Some of our OS X using friends claim they never, ever Restart. There’s no need, they exclaim beatifically: OS X is that rock-solid.

Smiling the secret smile of the recent initiate, we popped a freshly unwrapped Suitcase 10 installation disk into the CD-ROM drive. But instead of recognizing that a CD-ROM had been inserted, OS X lost its menu bar and the Finder disappeared from the Dock.

We invoked the force-quit dialog box and saw once again that OS X thought it was running over a dozen smiling copies of the Finder.

Force-quitting one idiotically grinning Finder added two more to the list. “Relaunching” the Finder simply caused more non-working Finders to be added. It was impossible to restart, impossible to log out.

We kept trying anyway. Time passed. Infants filled their lungs with air, consumptive Teamsters died muttering their wives’s names. We clicked Relaunch, Relaunch, Relaunch, hoping that one magic click would restore the menu bar and perhaps even the operating system to our otherwise empty screen. Nada.

We pushed the G4’s front panel button. Restarted without incident. And safely rebooted into OS 9, where we plan to remain for the foreseeable future.

Maybe all three of our hard drives (each made by a different manufacturer) are defective. Maybe this particular dual processor G4 came off the assembly line with an undiagnosed flaw. Maybe if Steve Jobs and a crack team of technicians spent a few days in our studio pulling everything apart they could locate the source of OS X’s uselessness.

“You have a bad Firewire cable. That’s all it was!”

“A dust ball on this potentiometer threw the whole machine off. There’s one for the books!”

“It was your mouse. Believe it or not.”

“Your CD-ROM tray was out of alignment by a fraction of a millimeter. Who’d a thunk it?”

“This is the bad pressing of OS X. There’s only one in existence. You got it. Sorry about that. Here’s a good copy.”

“Your wireless network was picking up radio signals from Moscow. It happens.”

We reckon the software we bought will come in handy when we replace our current Mac. We also reckon we’ve lost enough time giving Apple’s new system the old college try.

No doubt a few OS X fans will write in with suggestions. Perhaps, when our current workload abates slightly, we’ll forget the past few days ever happened, and try again — like an alcoholic who “forgets” that a small glass of wine could end his marriage or wrap his Chevette around a lamp post. But for now, we have work to do, and OS 9 will let us get it done.

24 September 2002