[X-Newbies] Pre newbie curiosity.

[Randy B.Singer]

Brian Durant said:

>I would like to hear
>some views on OS X and the Darwin/BSD undercarriage. Is OS X as
>unstable as some people make it out to be? 

Normally it is as stable as a rock.  I haven't had a system crash in the 
last 4 years.  I've only had a handful of application crashes, which I 
dealt with by simply re-launching the application and continuing on with 
my work.

You can surf the Web for hours on end and never have a crash due to 
memory management problems.  (Doing this was guaranteed to cause a crash 
under OS 8/9.)

>Programs can't be killed
>cleanly, etc? 

They can be killed (when necessary) as cleanly as you could want.  Go to 
the Apple menu and choose Force Quit.

>I saw a demo G5 at a shop here in Jakarta where the tech
>guy in trying to find the terminal app crashed 4 programs running and
>couldn't kill them seperately, but had to reeboot 2 times!!!

If you don't know what you are doing, I strongly advice staying entirely 
away from the Terminal.  In fact, I've found that there is just about 
nothing that you can't do from the graphic user interface.




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html