Tag Archives: leopard

do NOT upgrade to Leopard (why I’m offline)

I foolishly decided to upgrade to Leopard five days ago, at the beginning of my trip east for the holidays. This was the worst idea ever so for everyone waiting for me to respond to anything, please be patient… I won’t really be online until I can get back to LA and wipe my machine and start over.

For the geeks, here’s what’s going on with Leopard:

  • I cannot seem to run more than 3 major apps (Word, Mail, Firefox) simultaneously or else one freezes and the entire machine halts to a stop, requiring a restart.
  • No major app seems to be able to quit without requiring a “Force Quit” to get it to stop. Restarting seems to freeze midway through and require a hard reboot.
  • Opening a folder in Finder seems to take a good 20-30s and results in a freezing of applications, making multitasking impossible.
  • And then there’s Mail… When I open Mail with no other apps open (on network or off), it’s a disaster – trying to open each message results in a beachball. The activity monitor doesn’t seem to indicate anything strange – no hanging or anything, just regular opening of mailbox, moving and saving to mailboxes, syncing, etc. But it’s impossible to open messages because they hang for 30s before they’ll open. I don’t have the patience to wade through my thousands of message with this level of hanging. I went through all of the Apple Support notices, updated my DNS servers, and am at a complete loss.

Anyhow, if anyone has any clue, I’d be happy to provide more details and try whatever. But I can’t balance this and family and holiday shopping and hotels and keeping sane, so I’m just going offline until I get home. Plus, I need to do a proper backup before I can feel comfortable turning this thing over to anyone else. Le sigh.

Update: Thanks everyone for your comments! I ended up re-installing my machine and it’s a much happier camper. I realized that I’ve been through 7 machines and 4 OSes without ever cleaning anything out – all I do is firewire to the next one. So far, so good. But damn is email overflow daunting.
PS: Sorry about my blog… apparently the spam killed my quota and thus caused a hiccup in the comment section. Ironic, eh?