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On Tuesday, I discovered that Tiger had broken the SilverFast SE 6.0 scanning software that came with my Epson Perfection Photo 4870 scanner. Preview worked fine, but when I hit the Scan button, there was no response. I was in a hurry as usual, and hadn't installed any other scanning software since upgrading to Tiger on that computer, so my workaround was to boot from the copy of OS 10.3.4 I have on my external FireWire hard drive, install SilverFast on that, and I was back in business. LaserSoft has a Tiger compatible update available for SilverFast SE, which likely will be the cure.
OK, that issue was procrastination about keeping my software up to date. Scanner software is something usually not foremost in your mind until you need it and it doesn't work. But later that same day I encountered my worst stability incident yet with Tiger. I had just downloaded Firefox 1.0.5, and when I went to uncompress the disk image, the process stalled and the beach ball of death of routine commenced. After about five minutes of that, I decided to relaunch the Finder, after an attempt to start up the Activity Monitor and abort the stalled process failed with an eternally bouncing icon in the Dock. Unfortunately, the Finder icons disappeared, but it got no further than that.
I found that I could quit most of my programs using the Dock and either the quit command or Force Quit, but a few stalled and would not respond. I have little patience with this sort of thing, so after a few minutes packed it in and hit the Command /Control/ Power Key force restart. The gray screen with the Apple logo appeared and the little activity wheel whirled and the hard drive chattered, but nothing else happened. Perhaps it would have eventually sorted itself out had I waited, but I was now more inpatient than ever, and after a few more minutes hit the three finger salute again. This time I held down the Command and S keys to force the computer into safe boot mode, which presents a command line interface. I typed in the fsck -y diagnostic and disk repair command, which after a minute or so declared the disk to be healthy, upon which I typed Exit to initiate a boot into GUI mode. The Desktop appeared to my great relief, followed by the Dock and icons, and all seemed well.
Incidentally, the Firefox downloaded file decompressed and mounted the disk image without incident after the reboot.
I figured I was now out of the woods, but Wednesday morning when I went to unstuff a Stuffit .sit file, all I got was a folder full of icons that refused to respond and an error message. I tried reinstalling Stuffit Expander 9.0.1 (twice), trashing the preferences, but no joy. Still in a hurry, I figured the quickest solution to get at the contents of that stuffed file, which I needed, was to boot into OS 9. I had already tried Stuffit Expander 6.0.1 in OS X Classic Mode with similar lack of success.
However, that same copy of Stuffit Expander worked fine after I had booted natively into OS 9.2.2, a prima facie example of why I am very happy to have dual booting still available on my considerably less than cutting edge hardware. I got my file unstuffed, booted back into Tiger, in guess what? Stuffit Expander 9.0.1 was working again. Go figure.
None of these instances was a disaster; I was able to work around all of them; and the only data I lost were a few minor unsaved changes in four Tex Edit Plus documents during the Finder lockup episode. However, the hassles annoying, cost me too much non-spare time, and were frustratingly un-Mac-like. I'm hoping that 10.4.2 will enhance stability without introducing any serious new gremlins.
Now to get the thing downloaded. My first attempt crapped out when it was 97.7 percent complete, which represented nearly seven hours of download time over my snail's pace dial-up connection. But I can't blame that on Tiger. it would be nice, however, if Apple would provide an ftp address for downloading system updates, so that one could use and more dependable ftp client rather than a browser.
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Blogs ď OSX Odyssey ď
