Dear MR members, I'm at the end of my rope.
Introduction
In February I purchased my uMB. after using it for a month or so and being very satisfied with it, I urged my parents into purchasing one of the new spring '09 refreshed iMacs (24" with the 9400M GPU). Their old PC (Well, my old PC to be honest, a three year old Dell) was struggling to stay alive and well, caused me a lot of headaches. The only things my parents do is browse the internet and view our collection of photographs, so for the sake of ease I told them to buy an iMac, as it would make my life easier (or so I thought) and it would make the home network Apple-ish.
The start of the drama
After initial setup and staring at how awesome the machine is, I taught my parents the basic of os x (read: opening Safari and iPhoto), and they went on to use it. After a few days we ran into a problem: after browsing a webpage for "x" amount of clicks, with x being a variable from little as one time to something as great as twenty times, the browser refuses to load any page, of any site. It just gives server timeout errors. After installing Opera and FireFox, testing both wireless and ethernet connections, the problem persisted and the iMac since is the owner of a very bad reputation in the family. ("You'd better not try to look it up on the Mac, it'll probably won't be able to open it"-like comments).
More drama
After a few months of usage, the iMac refused to boot anymore. It was stuck at the spinning gear. I ran the hardware tests on the DVD and it told me that everything was fine. So then I booted off the DVD and ran the disk utility in order to verify the HDD. It gave me an error and basically it became obvious that the disk couldn't be repaired. So I reinstalled Leopard (fortunately, I had made a time machine backup some two weeks prior to the incident). Everything was fine again, but it still gives up displaying internet pages after "X" clicks.
The drama continues
In the course of last week, the iMac started developing yet another problem: if you want to shut it down, sometimes it'll give an error saying that a <insert random Apple application, from Finder(!) to iPhoto, iTunes, etc> cannot be quit and therefor OS X can't be shut down. (Come on ! It's a computer, it's processor is capable of the most awesome things, but yet it's unable to force quit an application on it's own and shut down when I want it to shut down?) I checked for running processes in the activity monitor but couldn't find anything disturbing. I also tried to force quit Finder and restart it, etc. But the thing just won't shut down. I have to manually force shut it down by holding down the power button.
Mad, I tell you..MAD!
Now, my faith in Apple's iMac line is declining day after day. I'm really close to just installing W7 on it and just deal with the every day Windows problems. (And over complicated simple desktop usage). So far I haven't ran into internet browsing problems in Windows. (I'm also running a Dell Studio 1555 with W7 next to my uMB). Since 10.5.7-10.6.1 my uMB also has got dodgy internet problems, with the internet browsers stalling after displaying a couple of pages. Also google images won't load on both my uMB and the family iMac. So I am kind of blaming OS X for screwing things up..
Would perhaps anyone know how I could get rid of this mess? It's been terribly annoying so far...
I sincerely like
products and OS X, but this is really starting to drive me mad.
Introduction
In February I purchased my uMB. after using it for a month or so and being very satisfied with it, I urged my parents into purchasing one of the new spring '09 refreshed iMacs (24" with the 9400M GPU). Their old PC (Well, my old PC to be honest, a three year old Dell) was struggling to stay alive and well, caused me a lot of headaches. The only things my parents do is browse the internet and view our collection of photographs, so for the sake of ease I told them to buy an iMac, as it would make my life easier (or so I thought) and it would make the home network Apple-ish.
The start of the drama
After initial setup and staring at how awesome the machine is, I taught my parents the basic of os x (read: opening Safari and iPhoto), and they went on to use it. After a few days we ran into a problem: after browsing a webpage for "x" amount of clicks, with x being a variable from little as one time to something as great as twenty times, the browser refuses to load any page, of any site. It just gives server timeout errors. After installing Opera and FireFox, testing both wireless and ethernet connections, the problem persisted and the iMac since is the owner of a very bad reputation in the family. ("You'd better not try to look it up on the Mac, it'll probably won't be able to open it"-like comments).
More drama
After a few months of usage, the iMac refused to boot anymore. It was stuck at the spinning gear. I ran the hardware tests on the DVD and it told me that everything was fine. So then I booted off the DVD and ran the disk utility in order to verify the HDD. It gave me an error and basically it became obvious that the disk couldn't be repaired. So I reinstalled Leopard (fortunately, I had made a time machine backup some two weeks prior to the incident). Everything was fine again, but it still gives up displaying internet pages after "X" clicks.
The drama continues
In the course of last week, the iMac started developing yet another problem: if you want to shut it down, sometimes it'll give an error saying that a <insert random Apple application, from Finder(!) to iPhoto, iTunes, etc> cannot be quit and therefor OS X can't be shut down. (Come on ! It's a computer, it's processor is capable of the most awesome things, but yet it's unable to force quit an application on it's own and shut down when I want it to shut down?) I checked for running processes in the activity monitor but couldn't find anything disturbing. I also tried to force quit Finder and restart it, etc. But the thing just won't shut down. I have to manually force shut it down by holding down the power button.
Mad, I tell you..MAD!
Now, my faith in Apple's iMac line is declining day after day. I'm really close to just installing W7 on it and just deal with the every day Windows problems. (And over complicated simple desktop usage). So far I haven't ran into internet browsing problems in Windows. (I'm also running a Dell Studio 1555 with W7 next to my uMB). Since 10.5.7-10.6.1 my uMB also has got dodgy internet problems, with the internet browsers stalling after displaying a couple of pages. Also google images won't load on both my uMB and the family iMac. So I am kind of blaming OS X for screwing things up..
Would perhaps anyone know how I could get rid of this mess? It's been terribly annoying so far...
I sincerely like
products and OS X, but this is really starting to drive me mad.
