[Ti] Dual monitor crash on PB667

[Michael Bigley]

>How can you tell if you are running Quartz or Quartz extreme?  I 
>absolutely need to run 10.2.5 at the latest for the pro audio 
>software I use, and to be able to access the Magma Cardbus PCI 
>expansion chassis.  The freeze only occurs in OSX, If i boot into 
>classic, all is fine.  When minimizing to the Dock, if a crash 
>occurs, you can see the animation go by, about a frame a minute, 
>until the beachball starts to spin.  The machine will no longer 
>respond to a force quit, once this happens.  There are no problems 
>at all running two monitors in OS 10.2.5 or 10.2.6, if all my work 
>is done on the powerbook LCD.  A crash will occur when  a window 
>resize type of operation is attempted on the external, though not 
>every time, but almost.  Thanks for your input.  I had seen some 
>utility that would bypass quartz entirely for slower computers, I 
>may try it.

This sounds more like the Finder crashing than a Quartz Extreme 
issue; as has been mentioned, if you don't have enough vram, QE just 
doesn't run.  Finder is, unfortunately, probably the crappiest app in 
OSX right now.

Try this: Create a new user, logout and login as the new user. Does 
the problem persist? If no, then you know it is related to something 
specific to your current user. Deleting Finder  prefs 
(com.apple.finder.plist in your User/Library/Preferences) may help.

If yes, then your problem is System or Disk related; First and 
foremost, I would check your fonts. FontDoctor X for Macintosh is a 
pretty good app for doing this; the demo version will look at your 
fonts and tell you which ones are bad, but will not repair them. Also 
boot into single user mode and run fsck -y; if that fails then boot 
from CD and run disk first aid.

Another thing that may help identify the problem is to go to your 
Utilities folder and open the app called Console; go to your 
preferences and under the crashes tab click on both options; move the 
console window over to your LCD and do something that will cause the 
crash, watch the console window and see what is causing the crash. Oh 
and errors like this:

WindowServer[181]: CGXDisableUpdate: Updates disabled by connection 
0xac17 for over 1.000000 seconds

Happen regularly in OSX, it is a bug, but have been happening on 
numerous (probably all) boxen since v10.0.  Another note is not to 
run Console all the time, as it will affect system performance. It is 
really meant for troubleshooting.
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Mike Bigley                Maineville, Ohio
       http://www.norbertrunning.com
Please support an American Indian Elder &
Medicine Man by visiting the above link.
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