Tiger in Panic, What about Leopard

[pds]

My mintel 1.66 CoreDuo with a gig of RAM had been chugging along with 10.4.10 for some months, slow but stable. The chugging was due to a full HD, but since I don't use it - it's for the other half and the kids - I left it.

But - love, you know. It overcomes wisdom like - if it ain't broke don't fix it!

So I cleaned up the HD and ran repair disk from the install CD (which is 10.4.7) and.... (dramatic pause) (/dramatic pause) the Colonel Panicked!

I did a new install of 10.4.7 (archive and install) and then upgraded it to dot ten, and the Colonel reappeared. I downgraded again and it was stable for about 3 weeks till my lovely son did the software update thing and - the Colonel came back (though strangely it was OK for about 4 days).

I have run the system test and the hardware test CD and they report nothing out of the ordinary. I cracked it open to clean out the dust and to make sure the Ram is seated properly - all OK.

The machine has the wife's school work on it - vital stuff. I am running Leopard on my MacBook and it is very nice, faster and oilier at the same time (a HD upgrade may be part of the faster though).

I am wondering if I should skip repairs and jump straight to another cat? (The Mac Genius here is a bit of an idiot, so that's out). Or just be happy with 10.4.7 - on a machine that works OK-ish?

[pds]

Any recommendations?

[Giaguara]

Panic.log will provide some clues for what causes it.

[pds]

Thanks Gia.

Does that survive the downgrade? After the upgrade the panics start on the login screen, and I have to downgrade. How do I find them if I'm booted on the CD or under the new system?

ps - I like your new sig quote.

[Satcomer]

First if the computer has ALL that important info on get a BACKUP now (like this cool mini backup drive)!!!

OS X is based on UNIX. UNIX use things called swap files to make sure it always runs a top speed. So OS x needs around 15% for temp files. when you really file a hard drive up any Unix system will slow down drastically. so using and external dive for backup+other big file storage will help keep you running your OS x in top shape.

Plus get a maintenance program like Onyx or Maintenance and run the maintenance routines on a biweekly basis to keep OS x running in tiptop shape.


Note: with 10.4.10 Apple rewrote some code so some plugins/programs needed rewrites. Check that angle.

[pds]

I left the machine running on 4.7 for a while (with precautionary backups), then took it over to Mr Apple to fix. Amr is evidently not the sharpest of Apple's many employees and he gave the thing back to me "fixed" but it crashed in 30 minutes.

I took it back, he reformatted and reinstalled 4.11 and it worked well for about 4 hours, then the Colonel came back, with a vengeance - it took about an hour of screwing with peripherals and letting things sit unplugged to get it back up.

Panic.log shows the backtrace to the Fire Wire area and since I suspect that there is a hardware problem in Fire Wire, I wonder if there is a way to eliminate FW support in the software. I hoping that if I can keep it from making FW calls, I will be ok.

Any ideas?

      
a bunch of hexadecimal numbers and then....
     Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI(2.9.10)@0x2b2ca000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.2)@0x24ccd000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.6.0)@0x2b26e000
         com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.6.0)@0x2b26e000

btw - this is from the mini, using 4.11. When it works, it works ok.