[X4U] iPad news

[Zane H. Healy]

At 3:08 PM -0800 1/31/10, zapcat wrote:
>On Jan 31, 2010, at 2:54 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>>Mac OS 9 might not have had preemptive multitasking, however, for a 
>>single user machine dedicated to Photoshop, I'd much rather have 
>>that than what we have now.
>>
>>As for stability, it was a question of how you configured my 
>>machine. When I was running Mac OS 9, I rebooted less often than I 
>>do now.
>
>
>Zane;
>
>I am most curious to know what it is that you do such that OS 9 was 
>more stable for you and why you prefer it to OS X pre-emptive 
>multitasking?
>
>I know that machines can behave differently depending on what 
>they're used for...I know that I had my fill of those little 
>exploding bomb ball dialogue boxes which the computer could 
>sometimes barely draw, when I'd get a system bomb...which would be 
>several times a day some days...

One secret was to run the 'macsbugs' debugger (I think that's the 
right name.  When running it, I could kill most programs that crashed 
without taking the system down.  Another thing was to always have a 
current backup of your system disk, and if a "upgrade" made it less 
stable, back it out.  One of the big things, and this is something I 
do with Mac OS X as well, is to avoid 3rd party extensions.  I also 
stripped the OS down to the absolute bare minimum, so that it only 
had what I needed.

The end result, a rock solid Rev.0 G4/450 AGP (and when I say Rev.0, 
I mean so early it shipped with System 8.6, rather than 9).  I can't 
remember at the moment if I stayed at 9, or I made it to 9.1, I know 
it wasn't quite as current as it could have been as that made it less 
stable.  IIRC, the only reason I even moved to Mac OS 9 was for 
iTunes.

I found that they lack of true multitasking could be used to my 
advantage.  The app I was actively using tended to get an unfair 
share of the CPU, and yet stuff got done in the background.  What is 
not to like about that?

I also dislike how there are a lot of unnecessary features in Mac OS 
X that you can't really turn off.

Zane



-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |