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When I installed on my mini, I just did an upgrade and haven't had any problems. I usually reformat and install, but I was too eager to play with the OS, I didn't feel like putting up with the hassle of restoring my files.

But my brother just told me his install (An upgrade too) was very buggy. Tomorrow I think I'll reformat his and reinstall. Maybe just for the halibut, I'll do it to mine too.

It sounds like you are having issues. The beach ball shouldn't be coming up as much as you suggested.

4. BOMArchiveHelper doesn't function like it was meant to (never really did work to my liking anyway)

And how is that apple's fault?

Also I forgot the stock market Dashboard program seems to not like adding in MSFT.  Says it's in invalid symbol...

I did a simple upgrade and I have had no problems whatsoever. Except for the fact that I cannot type today, but that is not Tiger's fault.

Spotlight would crash while trying to index my wife's Powerbook G4 hard disk. It gave no indication that it crashed but the console revealed repeated crashes of mdimport. Spotlight searches would turn up little if anything. A visit to Mac OS X hints for some spotlight terminal stuff helped remedy that problem and all seems well now. Safari doesn't like to rememeber its window position (in spite of trashing prefs repeatedly) and it has this odd stalling thing it does every so often. When its not getting its stall on its blazing though, I am starting to suspect that it may be a Haxie that is contributing to the Safari thing. All in all I have been pleased with Tiger. Most other problems were just with software that needed to be updated. I definitely echo the idea posted by others regarding the clean install. Takes a ittle longer but I think one can avoid a lot of problems that way.

I did an upgrade install, and I have had no problems. (By the way, Apple should make it more clear that to do a fresh install one must click "custom" when doing the install -- but that's another story.) I have a 1.25 Ghz AlBook.

So I have a few strange newbie questions that are driving me crazy..I just bought a used Powerbook as my first Mac, and I have been having round the clock crashes even after doing a clean install. Generally anything with Firefox and Thunderbird crash randomly 90% of the time, and using word is almost out of the question. I have fewer crashes with safari and mail, but randomly I get the beachball of death and the machine just freezes until I manually restart. I guess what I am wondering , is this fairly typical with a new build, or is third party software just problematic? I am just sad because I can accept crappy performance from XP (after 10 years of Microsoft I am used to it!) but I was hoping to escape it with a Mac... Any advice is appreciated, because I am just frightened of what to expect from now on..

botterpants wrote:

So I have a few strange newbie questions that are driving me crazy..I just bought a used Powerbook as my first Mac, and I have been having round the clock crashes even after doing a clean install. Generally anything with Firefox and Thunderbird crash randomly 90% of the time, and using word is almost out of the question. I have fewer crashes with safari and mail, but randomly I get the beachball of death and the machine just freezes until I manually restart. I guess what I am wondering , is this fairly typical with a new build, or is third party software just problematic? I am just sad because I can accept crappy performance from XP (after 10 years of Microsoft I am used to it!) but I was hoping to escape it with a Mac... Any advice is appreciated, because I am just frightened of what to expect from now on..

Use the hardware diagnostic disc to verify that the instability is not due to bad memory.

Last edited by jerwin (2005-05-08 10:26 pm)

MuckSavage wrote:

It sounds like you are having issues. The beach ball shouldn't be coming up as much as you suggested.

4. BOMArchiveHelper doesn't function like it was meant to (never really did work to my liking anyway)

And how is that apple's fault?

well they wrote the os didn't they if it was windows there would be angry mobs gathering in these forums

I did a full "Erase & Install". My hard drive was getting too cluttered, decided to backup and start fresh. Went from 10.2.8 to 10.4.

Install was a breeze, but a few little bugs hit me afterwards:

1. My Apple ID and password were denied during the setup process. Weird because I double-checked my entries.  Later, when I logged into Apple's web store the ID and password were accepted.

2. After install, I dragged the Tiger disc to the Trash/Eject in the dock. It disappeared, but it did not eject. Went to System Profiler and it didn't show any disc in the drive, yet hitting the outside eject button would not work. 

Related to this, System Profiler also froze up massively when I clicked on Hardware/Disc Burning. Force Quit wouldn't work.

Anyway, this was the first time the system booted under the new OS, so I gave it a reboot.  Sure enough, discs will eject properly now and System Profiler works fine.

3. Mail 2.0 Headache. I backed up my entire Home/Library on my second internal drive.  While setting up Mail 2.0 in Tiger I tried to import these old mailboxes containing 5000+ messages.  But when it tried to import, it came up with empty folders. I knew this was wrong because my mbox folders were 150MB apiece. I selected "Other" under mailbox type while trying import. The program scanned through my old e-mail titles while importing, but once again gave me an Import folder with an empty Sent folder and an empty Inbox.

Even stranger, the Import folder would simply disappear if I rebooted Mail.  All evidence of importing anything was gone. I solved the problem with a tip from another website.  Basically I quit Mail, threw the new Home/Library/Mail folder in the trash, threw Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist in the trash, and then dragged over my old Mail folder and my old com.apple.mail.plist file.

I started up Mail and this time it imported all of my messages correctly. I was about to have a heart attack if I couldn't have access to my old messages.

I installed all 3 ways on partitions of my firewire external. All installations work perfectly--given very minor tinkering. Cloned my erase and install/import from Migration Assistant installation to a newly formatted internal.

wavelayer wrote:

Printing trouble.  Can't seem to print anything off PhotoShop CS to an Epson printer.  I get strange code and stuff.

Photoshop 7 pulls this BS with my HP LaserJet 1200, too. It claims the printer's not a PostScript printer (it is), and then it prints page after page of gibberish. Not too happy about that. (I can print to PDF and print the file from Preview, but...)