(continuation from part 1) My conclusion from this experience is that parts of the serial code are unstable in 10.2.4. There are numerous reports on the web of problems with dial-up access and Apple has even offered a work-around for one problem.
My personal observations on this matter are: 1. having 'connect automatically when needed' turned on and not having access to the phoneline causes a k.p. in conjuction with one (or more) of Safari, Chimera/Camino, and Classic + Entourage/Outlook Express. (PS I have detect dialtone turned off); 2. unstable or lost connections also cause k.p. (i.e. if I am disconnected while online and not by my own volition); 3. internet sharing of a dial-up connection with an OS 9.2.2 Lombard over 100 BaseT ethernet is flaky at best, and impossible to use at worst. PS To get internet sharing to work I have to make sure that dial-up is ahead of ethernet in the order of preference in Networking preferences pane. The order of preference also seems to cause other problems so I prefer to keep ethernet first and modem second, and change it only when I'm trying to get internet sharing to work properly. Other miscellaneous observations over that week are that: - OS X is remarkably robust but still needs work (I installed and removed many programmes, including SPSS 10.0 (stats package FYI) for Classic which supposedly is OS X incompatible but I managed to get working just fine with a bit of deft manoeuvring... that the flags on one of the folders are set improperly and OS X sees the folder as a package rather than a folder... you have to view the folder's contents and then you can run the SPSS application. SPSS is dragging their feet on providing our university (bulk licencees are always at the bottom of the barrel... I figure what they're doing is dragging their feet so people with the $$$ will buy the retail version out of frustration rather than students like me who don't have $500 to spend who have to wait for the dregs at the end) with SPSS 11 which is a significant improvement and is OS X native)): - instability/DNS problems with sharing internet and dial-up can be overcome by rearranging preferred TCP/IP connections. I use both a LAN and dial-up for my internet access; - most apps are rock solid stable -- especially OS X versions of Microsoft Office (believe it or not... not one crash in 9 days with Excel & Word). -- Chimera and Safari crashed about equally often and for different reasons. Chimera usually went down b/c of QuickTime: don't drag a movie or click and drag in the wrong spot while a movie is open or b/c it was handling too many pages, whereas -- Safari would just up and quit once in a blue moon for no apparent reason). Even so, the grand total of browser crashes probably was no more than 8 over those 9 days! I had to quit them much more frequently to clear up problems that cropped up; 3. Finder has a few quirks (& it spontaneously combusted on me once during that 9 days... not bad when you consider the Finder in OS 9 would give up the ghost at least 1-2/day), the most annoying of which is if you right click on a whole slew of documents and happen to pass over the "Open with" item. I selected 128 iCab-created documents (I use an AppleScript in conjunction with iCab to collect data off the web) to "move to trash" but happened to pass over the "Open with" item -- that was a mistake that could've cost me 3 minutes of my life if OS X wasn't capable of true multitasking (while the beach ball was active searching for apps). Anyway, when the Finder returned it hadn't found an app to open with. Selecting fewer docs results in less of a lag. I've developed a similar kind of strategy with folders I've placed in the dock -- I will avoid moving the mouse over a pop-up folder unless I need to access its contents... OS X is really sluggish about dealing with sub-menus. Is this sub-menu delay thing something others have experienced (as a pre-emptive comment: it doesn't matter if you *haven't* experienced it (I'm sure people with G4/1000 don't ;) -- what's important are the people who HAVE, and *why*, and whether there's a *real* workaround that does not involve trying an OS X reinstall ;))? PS There's a Java Office package that seems like it'll be quite good in the future (for faster computers). Open Office? (something like that) (not the Sun spin off of StarOffice though!). It's 100% Java and was _very_ slick (and stable; I was disappointed it wasn't fast enough for use... I would've dropped $50 on the spot (a steal compared to the $120 for Office X, especially since that included 1 year's worth of on-line storage) if it'd worked for me) when I tried it on my Pismo/400. The only thing was that it was SLOWER than molasses in January so I suspect you'll need at least a G4/800 to use it effectively. The neat thing about it was that they licence the app to a *person* which means that you can access it anywhere in the world, provided you have a web connection and a Java-capable computer, and you can store your documents on their centralised server for something like $50/year. Anyway, I made these notes for myself so I'd have a trouble-shooting record of what I tried in OS X (plus a record that I ran a computer for 9 days in a row without as much as a restart). Perhaps someone else can glean a few nuggets of useful information from them. Eric. -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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