I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a bit more than 5 weeks. In that time I’ve only needed to restart my Mac for OS X updates. Tonight was the first time I’ve had to reboot my machine for non routine reasons. I’ll tell you what… A crash in OS X is quite graceful and makes you think… “uhhh… ok, I guess I need to restart”. Its completely different than the “OH SHIT! What the hell happened?” feeling you get when a big nasty blue screen of death pops up on a windows box.
I find it interesting that Apple keeps OS X super simple all the way down to crashes. Your average user doesn’t need to know any specifics about a crash beyond that a restart is needed. Those long cryptic messages Microsoft puts in their BSOD scare you more than anything. If you’ve experienced a windows crash… have you ever needed the information thats displayed? I thought so.
After being a Windows user for well over a decade I’m surprised that its taken this long for OS X to have its first crash. Luckily when the kernal panic occurred I was just tagging some photo’s in iPhoto. Its nice that iPhoto saves added/edited keywords on the fly. So I didn’t lose any time/information. Had I lost a hours worth of keywords I would have been quite bummed.
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ahhh. kernal panic…
normally those seem to go away on there own, but in the rare case that they do not i have just let things hang to see if it happens again.
I basically just restarted and haven’t seen any other symptoms since. Just before it happened I noticed that iPhoto was running a bit slow. So I opened up the Activity Monitor to see what was going on. iPhoto was churning away and using 1GB of memory. I should have taken that as a hint and restarted iPhoto, but no harm done. If it happens again I’ll know what to do :)