Do you ever have a feeling OS X is TOO good? Let me tell you a little story...

This is all in relation to my desktop (specs in sig). So approx. 6 months ago I moved from a Pentium Dual Core to a Core2Duo CPU. I had already been running OS X and experienced no problems with the CPU transition (kept the same MB). The system has been nice and quick and I have never had any want for another upgrade.....Until I started playing Second Life.

Running Second Life felt like I was trying to run Vista on a Pentium III! I decided maybe my 1.86 CPU was ready for a jump up. As a first step toward this. I ran up to CompUSA (now TigerDirect and a MUCH better place because of it) and purchased a new CPU cooler and Power Supply.

So anyway I get home and take apart the computer. What do I find in the process?....When I installed my new CPU over 6 months ago I had failed to properly secure my CPU cooling fan! Sure enough I went into BIOS to check my CPU Temp (and this was after it had been off for about 10 minutes) was over 90 degrees! That means for over 6 months now I have been running this thing 24/7, overheating the hell out of it!!!

Here is the kicker....I NEVER WOULD HAVE KNOWN. OS X (.4.8-.5.3) have all run without a hitch. It never crashed, powered down suddenly, or gave me ANY type of clue there was a problem. Only when I tried to run Second Life, which truly punishes the CPU did I notice any degradation of system performace! You know if this had been Windows I would have been blue screening every 10 minutes. My system has run pretty much 24/7 for the last 6 months!

Bravo Steve Jobs, Bravo

So True. I had a similar thing happen. The only difference was I had somehow blocked the vents, and I had no idea how hot it was getting. Windows blue-screened all the time, and I thought it was normal (This is windows), because OSX ran fine.

Great Job Apple

(When I started reading this, I thought OS X was crashing (What! Never!) but it became apparent later on it was Windows)

Interesting. You interpreted Windows trying to tell you something was wrong as "normal" and ignored it, while OS X happily ran the CPU completely out of spec and in a way that could seriously damage it, and you had no issue with it?

Windows may not have the most informative ways of reporting problems, but at least it reports problems. That's a bad thing?

I wasent saying it reporting problems was bad, but the method was. I would rather have it find out the CPU was overheating ( it isnt hard to find the temps ) and tell me in a better way, such as after crashing twice, start monitoring the temps, when it sees it getting hot, warn me in an informative way. Both OS's don't do this now. My point was how much better than windows OSX handeled it, but it's not perfect.

I see this all the time with Windows garbage. I can have a 24h prime stable overclock and once your start doing anything intensive with XP or Vista32 it'll throw random blue screens and app faults. On the other hand the system will be fine in OSx86, Linux, or Vista x64. Windows is so poorly coded (especially the 32 bit versions) that its shortcomings become much more apparent on a system running on the edge of stability.

I've never run Vista32 outside of a virtual machine, but I did run XP32 for a long time and never had a problem with it. At one point I was rebooting every couple of *months* for updates.

Thing with blue screens (BSODs) is that people look at them this way: "oh well another BSOD, let's move on, restart the thing, and wait for the next one..."

BSODs actually tell things. And if you're comfortable messing around with drivers and hardware over windows, you can easily solve stuff just by Googleing 'STOP 0x12345678' (whatever the code is for each scenario).

But here's the thing: the things BSODs say are really meant for techies. A regular user would have serious trouble when attempting to solve a BSOD.

So yeah, neither of the systems actually respond 'properly' to hardware problems. I find myself in a struggle if asked to choose between letting my hardware die because I didn't know something was wrong or being harassed whenever my hardware suffers.

Ideally, operating systems would present the messages normally found when Google searching for BSODs. They often present the possible causes and solutions.

OS X would of course try the solutions first and only notify the user if it couldn't solve the problem by itself

This is more a testament to the hardware fail safe mechanisms than the stability of the OS. I've tried it out on an old PC playing Doom3 and HL2. Pulled the heatsink off at full cpu load and everything slowed to a crawl but never crashed. The CPU should be able to to throttle down it's speed to protect itself from self destructing.

So in the OPs case was OS X actually doing to right thing and throttling it but he just didn't notice because he was just doing light tasks? Or does heating directly effect performance?


Still, OS X should have told him it was too hot, though maybe it does in a real apple machine with standard processors.