10.4.4 Ruined my computer

Hi Sam, I have a few thoughts regarding your posts in this thread. One, did you ever get a clarification regarding repairing disk permissions? Repairing disk permissions has been a kind of voodoo operation for a couple of years now. It seemed more important with Jaguar from two OS's ago. But it still may be important at times, especially if you install many third party applications. Normally you would repair disk permissions from disk utility which is an application on your hard drive. You can also repair disk permissions from the install CD, but there is no advantage to this and it requires you to boot from the install CD which takes time. On the other hand you cannot repair disk from the disk utility application. You have to boot from the install CD, then scroll down to disk utilities from the top menu and repair disk that way. Many of us own more substantial Disk repair tools like Disk Warrior.
In general I think most of us perform some kind of routine maintenance of our Macs to keep them well-tuned. For me, I run Onyx about once a month which includes repairing disk permissions, and running cron scripts (these are daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance operations that might run automatically depending upon how you run your Mac). The single most important maintenance procedure you should do is back up your Mac, preferably onto an external firewire drive. If you don't back up your files or your entire hard drive in this day and age, you have no one to blame but yourself if your hard drive fails or someone steals your computer. I back up to a LaCie 250 gig firewire using Superduper, an inexpensive shareware. You might want to take a look at Dr. Smoke's latest version of "Troubleshooting Mac OS X" available online or in CD. You can view the website here. Post back more questions when you have them
David Safir

iMac G5 20 inch, 15 G4 Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.4)

iMac G5 20 inch, 15 G4 Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.4)

I have recently returned to a Mac in the hopes of avoiding constant problems, and now the update to 10.4.4 has unfortunately created them. Though my problems since updating have been minor compared to many others in these posts (Help menu won't work, Safari crashes when trying to delete mail) they nevertheless make daily operation difficult. I have virtually no third party software installed (one printer and MS Office only), so the notion that this is a user problem seems very questionable. So is the best current advice to use the Archive and Install approach?

Pink Floyd's "Momentary Laps of Reason"

After two years with her, the honeymoon was going flawlessly and seemingly endlessly. I could count the number of times that I had to force quit on half of one hand! And I was running pieces of everything in the universe from Photoshop to VVigit to DAQplot, Final cut HD, MS Office and ilife. Even Classic and my old apps ran like #@*% thru a goose on Ex-lax.

Then a friend with a couple of extra licences of 10.4 seduced me with some of her widgets and, without even getting me drunk, forced herself on my hard drive and expelled my 10.3.

WOE and ANGUSH...a great nashing of teath...a constant pulling of hair!!! And nothing is the same! It started with Windows media player. I thought it a small thing so I bought some 3rd party stuff and to this day still cant get some file types to play. Then all other apps became affected in one way or another. As I write this, for the second time, Safari has crashed / hung. There is not an app that I have that has not needed a fix, debug, upgrade or just plane wont start. Earlier today, even my old trusty Entourage stoped and just stairs at me with that blank accusing start up screen. And not all at once, it has progressed with time.

Oh sure it was fun and fast at first, but slowly and surely it all came unraveled.

If I told her "It didn't mean anything" do you think 10.3 would come back to me?

I tried the fixes in this forum: fixing permisions, reinstall 10.4.4 combo, all to no avial. The question is where do we go from here. Is a clean install of 10.3 the only way.

I am sorry, I disagree with those of you here who are of the opinion that we should apply some maintanance that nobody (Apple) recomends or instructs us to do prior to the upgrade.

We Mac-kers (I, true blooded since '85) choose this road less traveled because of forthought or at least recklessness. There are reasons that we continue to buy these expensive, hard-to-get-software-for, "insanely great computers." They were truly insanely great computers and software.

We have come to expect a certin level of performance. When you upgraded from 7.0 to 7.1, you knew it was going to work. Now the jump from 7 to 9 or 10 was going to take some comitment, but you knew that going in. Apple has given us the confidence that upgrading could be accomplished with little to no fear of catastrophic failure. To perform, what appeared to be an average Apple non-threatening upgrade and go from 10.3 to 10.4 and then have most of your apps not work is inane.

Secondly, to buy the argument that so many of us have been installing over bad or hidded problems requires a pretty big concidence, considering that so many of us were running just fine prior, and all of us failed after the install. Further, if 10.3 was so stable and forgiving, why is 10.4 so unstable. The powers that be should have seen this obvious fraility and provided instructions or pre-instilation maintenance to avoid it. At the very least called it OS 11 and we could have preped our bank accounts for the expendatures.

A pox on the house of the division that released this ill-conceved update/upgrade without fully vetting it!

There is some good information in the following FAQ explaining why some users have so much trouble with upgrades,and others don't. Perhaps it will be helpful to people reading this thread for assistance with an upgrade problem:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121931

Due to the fact that I have been updating since '85, I did all of that that was appropriate, with the exception of fixing permisions prior to the update. As a mater of fact, I know that I need to let it alone while the update was in progress and went to the local laté shop and had a couple while it was in progress.

When I returned, restarted and everything appeared good and faster. However, less than 1 hour into it, Windows Media Player stoped working and it has been a steady decline from there. It appears that weekly something new starts acting up (Entourage last night and Word this morning).

Agian, I restate the case that this is not what we have come to expect from Apple and their upgrades.

I have, through great perserverance and no little rasing from my associates, avoided the PC road for this many years and wish not to start down it now. It is my fervant hope this is not sympomatic of the Intel-ification of our treasured OS.

Except for Safari mentioned previously, all apps you are having problems with are not Apple applications.

Certainly Apple sends builds for upcoming updates to software companies such as Microsoft before the final release but all responsibility for problems (after installing a major OS update) with 3rd party applications such as WMP, Entourage and Word does not rest with Apple. If you are experiencing problems with a number or all Apple applications after installing an update, that is a different story.

Have you reported your problems with these Microsoft applications to Microsoft?

Bruce, generalizing based upon your individual experience is unlikely to be accurate. This is a user forum, so people of necessity arrive here because they are having problems or need information. There are several million mac users in the United States and it's likely a very large majority have updated successfully. In the past several years as Apple has advanced it OS through OS X, there have been a couple of major glitches which affected large numbers of people. In particular a couple of years ago many users had their external drives hosed because of a compatibility problem with the Oxford chipset. I see nothing with Tiger in general or 10.4.4 in particular to suggest a widespread problem. I maintain a small bevy of Macs in our family. I have updated seven of then to 10.4.4 without any problems at all. Threatening to return to Windows is of little consequence here. We have a Dell notebook in our home my wife uses for work and it works very well. I much prefer the Tiger operating system however.

ds

My experience was almost identical to Sam343242. On my G4 PCI Graphics, I did the Software Update, as have done with 10.4 to 10.4.1 and to 10.4.2 and to 10.4.3, but this time when I went to reboot, I got the grey screen with the apple, and the whirling "we're workin' on it" icon -- and that's where it stayed. Somehow, I can't imagine that we are the only two.

Reading all the tech articles was little help. I was hoping to find a way to fix it without rebuilding the entire system. (Several things tried -- none worked.) In the end, that seems to be what's required. Do an archive install off of the CD, download the "stand alone" 10.4.4 installer, (120 MB -- that took a while!) and then rebuild all the things that get lost in that process (printer drivers, etc.).

I'm actually one of the lucky ones. I have a dual-boot machine with System 9 on another partition. I could still get to the internet to read articles, even though System X was too badly injured to function.

This has cost me more time than I like to spend on what was presented as a straightforward system update. Care, care, Apple!

Moseso, again, we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of users here, so you can bet that no matter how carefully the Apple software developers test their updates, there will be occasional glitches. Every computer becomes unique with its owner as countless operations, downloads, websites, etc. are performed, installed, updated and on and on. The question is whether this decimal update caused any widespread problems. Two posts from two people who have never posted in Apple Discussions before don't constitute an outbreak. I'm sure it is frustrating to have to archive and install the OS and update to 10.4.4, but it does happen. If you took proper backup precautions you would not be in this position. Most of us who rely heavily on our Macs back up to an external hard drive. My backups include not just file backups but an entire clone or bootable duplicate of my hard drive. So when I perform an update, if is goes bad, I can erase my drive and reinstall my last version from my firewire. Firwire drives are dirt cheap as is the software to create a bootable duplicate drive. I use Superduper, a nice inexpensive shareware.

ds

Two posts from two people
who have never posted in Apple Discussions before
don't constitute an outbreak.

Agreed...

If you
took proper backup precautions you would not be in
this position.

"Proper" precautions should be those precautions that a person who "reads the manual" (I do) would have encountered during the Software Update process. At no time has Software Update said, "Whoa there, pardner! Have you made sure your disc permissions are correct? Why don't you go do that before proceeding with this update?" I'd never heard that such a thing was quite possibly REQUIRED, to ensure one's computer would restart, until after my computer would no longer start.

As I said, I was fortunate to be able to boot Sys 9, run Netscape and read deeply, including here, about update problems. I can only imagine what I'd be thinking if I didn't have a dual-boot rig!

Yes! System construction must be a HORRIBLY complex task. That's why it's CRUCIAL that the "proper" precautions have to be more readily prescibed to folks like me -- who don't hang out here all that often. I am a "happy Mac user" for over 10 years. The reason? Mostly, it just works! I haven't done anything extraordinarily strange -- and SURELY haven't messed with my System Folder -- to expect that a simple running of Software Update could crash the whole rig.

Proper" precautions should be those precautions that a person who "reads the manual" (I do) would have encountered during the Software Update process,

I don't agree. Proper precautions require that you protect your investment. That might mean an uninterruptible power supple where power failures are common. That might mean lightning protection in some states. At every level it means backing up the contents of your computer. These are complex machines prone to hardware and software conflicts. This may seem like a plug and play environment, but I think those days are over. These machines need maintenance and that is what people learn about in this forum. Repairing disk permissions has been an endless source of discussions for several years, with opinions varying from "never needing to do it" to others who worship at the "repair disk permissions altar". I took my lead a few years ago from Dr. Smoke who outlined maintenance and repair procedures in his book "Troubleshooting Mac OS X". His latest edition is out for Tiger.

ds

This may seem like a plug and play environment, but I think those days are over.

Hmmmm... Earlier you mentioned thousands (you might have said "hundreds of thousands") of installations. That means A LOT of users -- a great many of whom don't have the time, inclination, or perhaps, the wherewithal to be very techie about it. Many, like me, labor in an area where a computer has become a valuable tool (small business) yet have no IT department to take care of this stuff. As I said, SMALL business. These things are supposed to be a boon for the Third World as well; not just a well educated elite. The movement towards plug-and-play aided these goals and uses. If, indeed, what you say is true, I fear that Apple (and all the others increasing complexity, senselessly) have taken a fatal turn.

Apple's origins, and success, has lain in the creation of a computer of beautiful simpicity -- for "everyman." If they succeed in becoming "techies only," they will fail...

It's an interesting question, whether in the desire to create more business and better computers, things have gotten too complex. My wife and I wonder constantly where all this tech stuff will end. Do we want an infinitesimal sized screen to watch downloaded tv shows? Do we want an entire wall at home to vegetate in front of? Do I really need to be able to trade stocks from the bathroom? I have concerns but in the meantime I am going to learn how to maintain this equipment because I need it. How about this story. We bought the supposedly wonderful Neptune washer a couple of years ago. Whoops, there is a big problem with mildew and a class-action lawsuit around this subject. And amazingly there in the fine print in the manual is a maintenance procedure with Chlorox to prevent this mildew. Frankly I didn't ever think a "washing machine" would need preventive maintenance. So I understand your angst.
ds

I agree with both sides of this issue but OS 9 was certainly not maintenance free - remember Conflict Catcher and rebuilding the Desktop?

IMO, OS X is more forgiving that most give it credit for but OS X is complex. There are thousands of files and components updated with a major OS X Update such as 10.4.4.

Before installing a major OS X Update such as 10.4.4, I always check the hard drive for any directory problems with Disk First Aid via Disk Utility when booted from the Tiger install disc. I only repair disk permissions after installing any 3rd party software. I update my bootable clone saved to a Firewire drive, I quit all running applications and I disconnect all external peripheral devices (except for a keyboard and mouse) before installing the update. I've been doing the same since Panther was first introduced and I haven't experienced any problems with any major OS Updates thru Panther and so far with Tiger.

Although this may not be Apple's recommended procedure, I agree Apple should provide their recommended procedure before installing a major OS Update as a pop-up warning or information message but even so, things can and do go wrong regardless.

Very well said Allan. I have read the same information here that you have (perhaps you posted some of it), namely that permissions changes are only a problem on third party software. I run Disk Warrior once a month by habit to keep the disk crispy clean.

ds