Hi, I am having a lot of problems with Mountain Lion (ML) on my fairly old Mac Pro. I think my Mac Pro is the earliest version that is supported for ML. The original installation of ML ran fine (as far as I know) for about 6 or 7 months, but then some big problems arose. I reinstalled ML on a different hard drive and that worked for a few weeks, but then it developed some other (similar but different) major problems. I then did another reinstallation of ML on yet a third hard drive and now I'm having another set of problems (similar but different). Here is a summary of what I remember about the 3 sets of problems:
FIRST INSTALLATION: I upgraded from Lion around the first of the year and I did not notice a problem for about 6 to 7 months. At some point, though, I had problems with the 2 Microsoft Office apps that I use. Suddenly I could not save or print Excel files or Word files. I reinstalled MS Office a few times, but the problems persisted. I ran Disk Utility many times. Finally, I gave up and did a fresh install of ML on a different hard drive. I used Migration Assistant to copy my user files to the new ML disk. SECOND INSTALLATION: This second ML installation seemed to work for a few weeks. Both Excel and Word worked, but then at some point I had problems with Apple Mail and Safari. Safari would crash some (but not all) of the time, even when going to sites that I had gone to every day for years. Mail would not even run at all. The icon would bounce for a second or two, but then crash before even bringing up the Mail window. So, I gave up again and did yet another fresh install of ML on yet another hard drive. I again used Migration Assistant, but I tried to migrate fewer things. THIRD INSTALLATION: This third ML installation worked for about 2 weeks, but then yesterday I started having trouble with Excel again. Mail was also a little weird (it would not do address completion for an address that always completed before -- and the completion check box in Mail Preferences was checked). And Toast would not start because it said it needed QuickTime 7 or later, even though I have QuickTime 10.2 installed (and then I also downloaded and installed QuickTime 7). Sometimes I use Toast Video Player and that also would not start because it wanted QuickTime 5! I'm not crippled yet (like when Mail would not even start), but enough things are flaky that I think I have a serious problem again. The problems associated with the 3 installations are not identical, but they seem similar enough to suggest some general incompatibility. Does anyone have any ideas about what is going wrong? And why does each installation start out fine, but then develop problems after a while (often a SHORT while)? Since I used 3 different hard drives, I find it hard to believe that it's a hard drive problem, but I suppose anything is possible. I believe they were all 3-TB Seagate drives. I guess I could go back to Lion, though I don't know if everything is backward compatible. For example, now that my iPhoto and iTunes (and other) libraries have been updated to run with the latest Mountain Lion versions of the apps, will these libraries still work with the Lion versions? One possibility is that a newer Mac might help. I am hoping to get a new Mac Pro (the newly designed cylinder type), so I'd hate to buy the current model if the new model is supposedly coming out very soon. I have a Mac Mini, so I guess I could use that and try to connect my extra drives externally until I get a new Mac Pro. Any suggestions to solve my current problems would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Gregg _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
