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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Freezing MAC / Saffari

rswmkw - Oct 21, 2006 - 7:47 am

Hello We have a G4 Mac ( Mirror) just upgraded to tiger 1.25 Gigs of Memory installed as well. We are freezing during Internet use Safari . All updates have been done to software. We had no issue before. Do we need the to install the full 2.gigs of memory the machine can use? or is there somthing elese we can do to stop this. We must reboot, you can't excape through the finder

Thank you in-advance for your help

Rob

stottm - Oct 22, 2006 - 3:08 am

You have plenty of memory, no need to add more...

Does Safari freeze the system entirely? That's what it sounds like if you have to reboot. Does it freeze if you don't run Safari? Is it freezing when you go to a particular website or will it just lockup when you start Safari? Does it lockup when running Flash or Quicktime or other special media content. Videos, Sound, Animation, Java, etc.?

How did you "upgrade"? e.g. Did you do an Archive & Install or did you perform an Upgrade when you installed Tiger?

Sometimes upgrades can be troublesome especially if you had unusual software loaded such as haxies (little customizing applications that change the way OS X works to add features or change behavior). The Archive & Install is generally recommended because it moves you data out of the way, installs the new OS cleanly and then moves your data back in place. However, there are times when one has to backup all the data and install the new OS from scratch. i.e. Wipe & Install option.

However, before you resort to the extreme measure of wiping and re-installing the operating system you can try the following:

1. Open Disk Utility (Found in Applications->Utilities). Highlight the hard drive and click on the Repair Permissions option. Also make sure journaling is turned on. i.e. the "Enable Journaling" option is grayed out.

2. Try deleting the Safari Preferences file (it will recreate itself when Safari starts): /Users/YourAccount/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist
This will wipe all your Preference settings and options in Safari but your bookmarks will be intact. A corrupted preferences file can cause an application to crash.

3. Try creating a new user account and see if the problem re-occurs or not. i.e. does everything work fine when using the new user account? If so then consider backing up the data from the bad user account and then deleting and recreating the bad account then restore the data.

Try #1 & #2 first then resort to #3. If nothing works, consider backing up your data and performing a Wipe & Install after you boot with the Tiger installation DVD. This will reformat the hard disk deleting everything and then install Tiger from scratch. You will then need to apply all the updates with Software Update and re-install your applications then restore your data from backup. It can take quite some time to do all of that but it will ensure a properly working system.

Thousands of unexpected things can go wrong during an operating system upgrade. Every time Apple releases a new OS X version, there are many who report problems in discussion forums throughout the Internet. The Archive & Install option is much safer then the Upgrade option. The Wipe & Install option is the best but it requires you to fully backup all your data and applications and to rebuild the entire system back the way you had it.

Several excellent backup options exist. If you have .Mac you can install the .Mac Backup utility. This will backup your data to CD's or DVD's or an external hard disk or a second internal hard disk or even to personal storage space on the .Mac website. Another option is to purchase an external firewire hard disk and use the free utility (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/) to image the disk and make an exact bootable copy of the main hard disk onto the external hard disk. This way if anything goes wrong, you can boot up using your backup disk and everything will be back to normal. You can then SuperDuper the external disk back to your main disk and be right back where you originally started. SuperDuper does sell a more advanced version but the only features it adds are meant for more technical users. Some people are so happy with SuperDuper they buy it even though they don't need to. The money helps the developer and it's a nice way to pay him back for saving your system.

When Leopard ships next year, there will be a new backup method called Time Machine that will use a second hard disk internal or external to backup your files automatically and allow you to traverse the data as if you are going back in time in a time machine. Allowing you to find deleted or overwritten files, etc.

Now that your system is freezing, if you don't have a backup; your data is still there but the OS is unstable. It's too late to rely on SuperDuper. You can copy what you have but what you have is not stable. SuperDuper will work but you won't be able to simply revert to what you had before the upgrade. But you can use SuperDuper to make an exact copy of your system as it stands right now. Then I would recommend running the Tiger install again and choosing the "Archive & Install" option. If the system is stable after doing this you can restore any missing applications or data from the backup. When Leopard ships you can use SuperDuper to backup your system prior to the upgrade so you don't have a similar upgrade problem that you can't back out of. SuperDuper gives you full rollback ability which is the best kind of backup. You can revert absolutely everything back to the way it was if something goes wrong.

rswmkw - Oct 24, 2006 - 12:22 pm

Hello, We did a install and arch for the install of tiger. The crashes cause the whole computer to freeze and must restart from there. I tried the new user still crashes in that as well. We always back up and we do have a .Mac account as well. I am going to try option 2 tonight

Thank you for all your help!