Tim Flight

Someone asked me the other day what I thought about Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and its stability. Basically as far as I’m concerned it is the least stable major release since 10.0 and 10.1. For the first time in years I have applications that unexpectedly crash daily. Mail.app, Safari, and QuickBooks Pro seem to be the most vulnerable although those are the programs I use the most. The only app I use that doesn’t crash frequently now is NetNewsWire Lite.

I had performed an archive and install of 10.4 Tiger so I should have started with a pretty clean slate. I repaired disk permissions before and after the install as well as before and after the updates since 10.4.0. Still apps crash more frequently than I desire.

Today Mail.app crashed and when I relaunched all of my mail and accounts were gone…. it was as if the app had never been launched as it asked if I wanted help importing mail from another application and if I wanted help creating new accounts. Luckily there was an easy, but obscure fix.

I noticed that in ~/Library/Preferences/ there was the usual com.apple.mail.plist but there was also a com.apple.mail.plist.saved. I made backup copies of both files, then removed com.apple.mail.plist and renamed com.apple.mail.plist.saved to com.apple.mail.plist. I restarted mail and everything went back to where it was. I made another fresh backup of my entire home directory just to be safe.

If this continues (which I have no reason to believe it will not) then I’m going to do another archive and install of 10.4 and apply all of the updates again. Rumor has it 10.4.2 will be due out soon so I may wait for that before taking drastic measures again.

I’m glad I’ve kept my Xserve running 10.3.9.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.