All times are GMT -6. The time now is Disillusioned with a Mac Mini
Posted 08-04-2010 at 07:32 PM by DavidF215
The Mac mini crashes yet again. For an OS that claims to “just work,” OS X Leopard crashes more than my Windows 7 computer.
I have encountered this problem twice within the three weeks that I’ve owned the Mini. I have all our music stored on a Windows 7 workstation. iTunes on the Mac is pointed to the Windows music share for its music library. I forgot to change the automatic update settings in Windows 7 to manual, so on two recent occasions Windows 7 installed the updates and rebooted automatically.
Unfortunately for Mac OS X, it apparently is not smart enough to detect when a network connection drops. iTunes was open, yet not playing music, when the media server rebooted. So the network connection between the Mini and Windows 7 hangs in Mac OS X Finder. Tried closing all applications, but OS X still cannot “eject” the share without claiming some application has the connection open. Since I’m still learning the new Mini, I checked the Force Close list, which was empty, and attempted to restart. Then the system hangs and never shuts down—without holding in the power button until it turns off.
Maybe the marketing slogan should be “Just works whenever it wants.” Kind of along the same line of the recent iPhone antennae issue fix: “Just don’t hold it that way.”
As time goes on OS X is convincing me more and more to go Linux or BSD. So I installed FreeBSD 8.1 on the AMD64 computer that the Mac mini replaced. Now to test another BSD distribution that hopefully won’t hang due to a network connection drop.
I have encountered this problem twice within the three weeks that I’ve owned the Mini. I have all our music stored on a Windows 7 workstation. iTunes on the Mac is pointed to the Windows music share for its music library. I forgot to change the automatic update settings in Windows 7 to manual, so on two recent occasions Windows 7 installed the updates and rebooted automatically.
Unfortunately for Mac OS X, it apparently is not smart enough to detect when a network connection drops. iTunes was open, yet not playing music, when the media server rebooted. So the network connection between the Mini and Windows 7 hangs in Mac OS X Finder. Tried closing all applications, but OS X still cannot “eject” the share without claiming some application has the connection open. Since I’m still learning the new Mini, I checked the Force Close list, which was empty, and attempted to restart. Then the system hangs and never shuts down—without holding in the power button until it turns off.
Maybe the marketing slogan should be “Just works whenever it wants.” Kind of along the same line of the recent iPhone antennae issue fix: “Just don’t hold it that way.”
As time goes on OS X is convincing me more and more to go Linux or BSD. So I installed FreeBSD 8.1 on the AMD64 computer that the Mac mini replaced. Now to test another BSD distribution that hopefully won’t hang due to a network connection drop.
Total Comments 5
Comments
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I'm thinking I'd blame Windows 7 myself...
I have a slew of Macs running the most recent versions of 10.5 and 10.6. These machines all work with each other sharing one main library of tunes. Things come on and off the network all the time. Nothing hangs, it just works...
Note...I have NO Windows computers running.Posted 08-09-2010 at 12:15 PM by beller 
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Having bought a MacMini myself recently for MorphOS and using Mac OSx for the first time recently I can honestly say I think its mostly awful.
And ITunes is porbably the most resource heavy, slow, badly desgined media player I have ever used.Posted 08-11-2010 at 06:21 AM by JJ
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I've had two Mac Minis, one running Tiger (10.4) and one Snow Leopard (10.6). I gave the old one to my brother (who wanted to format the HD for Windows until I advised him not to), never having installed 10.5 on it.
I've never had the problems you describe but am a light iTunes user, never sharing music over a networkPosted 08-23-2010 at 12:58 PM by garyg
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David,
JJ is spot on. iTunes is a hunk of garbage...bloatware extreme - just the worst to use in my opinion.
Though by the sounds of things you may have some sort of HW issue.Posted 08-24-2010 at 07:08 PM by Debaser
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What would happen if you opened a shell and did a umount -f on the stale mounted filesystem, rather than relying on Apple's interface?
Of course, you shouldn't have to do that. But Apple doesn't much like fixing problems with the Samba filesystem. If they had their way, I'm sure they'd drop support for it, altogether.
And yeah, I'm not a big iTunes fan, either. Could also be part of the problem.Posted 08-12-2011 at 09:31 AM by Ilwrath
