I am a Mac Virgin - Day 2: Lightning isn't the only thing that crashes

It just works right? Wrong.

I'm not exactly sure what the OS X equivalent to the Blue Screen of Death is so I'm not sure whether or not I've come across it yet. From what I can tell the closest thing it could be is the multi colored ball that just spins and doesn't let you click on anything - I've found out that this is called the rainbow ball of doom, awesome.

I'm not going to lie, after I did the initial setup and finally started using OS X it crashed...A LOT. Or at least I think that's what's happening, but to be fair I didn't really have any idea of what was going on or what to do when that ball started to spin. Realizing that ctrl + alt + del meant nothing I tried to click around (and failed), tried to force quit running applications (and failed) and tried to bring up the restart options (and double failed). Although I could move the mouse the keyboard didn't seem to respond...or did it?

What's frustrating is that I don't know whether I can't get anything to respond because OS X was having problems and the Bluetooth connections were bailing out, or if OS X was just straight up frozen. At this point I just held down the power button and forced the shutdown.

This has happened about 6 times in one day - what up with that?

I'm not really doing much when this happens - installing some programs, surfing the web and poking around, but I actually suspect the problems are coming from external drives. I somehow believe this became my one way ticket to Crashville. Time to poke around the System Preferences (which are intuitive enough and involved way less clicking than Windows to get where you want).

I have 2 external hard drives with all my media on them and they're both formatted NTFS Windows styles. Ever since what I like to call The Great Fail-Format of 2009, I've been taking backing my shit up pretty seriously. So anyway, I was copying over data from one drive to the other and to my Mac HD because I wanted to set one up as a Time Capsule and the other one for porn general use.

But then strange things started happening: the computer would sleep, drives would eject/stop copying and OS X would otherwise crash. I'm not exactly a computer square, so using my not so inconsiderable computer knowledge I determined that the most logical thing to do would be to check the Energy Saver settings.

The options here don't exactly go into great detail so I selected what seemed to be sensible. Like most things in life I forced my way through it and managed to get it done...my computer just can never sleep or turn off hard disks now but that's besides the point.

After that I reformatted the drives to OS X Extended (Journaled) format and moved things around once again and the random copy fails actually seemed to stop. I still don't know if Windows will recognize this type of file system, but at least I have the stuff shared over the network anyway. At least since doing that I haven't had any crashes and I put the settings back...but it's also only been a few hours.

Things are much better but one drive still has ejection problems when the computer goes to sleep, but really who doesn't? Unfortunately, it also wake's the computer up from sleep so I'm not sure if it is 100% compatible with OS X. One way to get around it is a unmount script but I'm just going to veto that idea and not let the computer sleep at all (or at least unmount before I do)...energy savings fail.

Jon said he encountered similar freezing problems when he first got his Mac and ended up doing a full re-install. On the other hand, at least Apple has some decent support pages to help you out along the way (although they seemed to be geared to non-technical people).

Lose Control, Gain Command

OS X Shortcuts for lamers

I think I've just leveled up.