had enough of mac, looking for new OS and laptop

[Jay Vaughan]

Oops .. Sorry for previous question, I see the trouble now .. My suggestions for you:

Reformat your Mac and install afresh. Doesn't make sense that you have such problems.  Maybe you've got a dodgy USB port? Some rubbish mouse driver for a dodgy mega button mouse, perhaps?

Also external drives must be treated with more respect on OSX than windows, don't forget. If you ever just disconnect the drive without unmounting first you will force OSX to do a rigorous check of the disk the next time you plug it in .. This sometimes looks like drives aren't working when in fact your Mac is repairing damage done .. Always, always cleanly unmount drives, never make an exception. Windows doesn't have such a rigorous requirement because it treats all external drives as cache-less .. Not so with OSX. It's Unix, remember. That cache needs to be committed every time you use an external disk. Use Disk Utility on all your drives and repair if needed - you might be surprised at just how much damage has been done by a single unclean disconnect.. It can cause symptoms like you describe .. Also, fat is ass on OSX .. Use OSX format with journalling on external drives to avoid future nightmares.

For midi problems you should turn on debug.log and see if the driver is giving you clues about the problem - USB resets, bus hangs, etc. Google how to turn on debug.log - it's relatively easy but disabled for consumers. USB MIDI should also be on it's own hub .. Never mix it up with your keyboard/mouse/disks - this is asking for trouble because, for example, some cheap external USB disk drive controllers will totally stall the bus while waiting for the disk. Never mix critical devices on the USB Subsystem .. Music devices should be on their own segment. Use the USB Prober tool (google) to determine your topology and fix accordingly. I bet you've got a cheap disk and midi devices disturbing each other.

What midi device, by the way? I have  written a few USB MIDI kexts and I know for sure that you can get more details about what the driver is experiencing using the kextload tool on the command line .. If you want help with it maybe we can meet on IRC later ..


;
--
seclorum 

On Aug 1, 2011, at 23:43, Martin Naef <mnaef at navisto.ch> wrote:

> Paul,
> 
> Win7 runs fine on the Apples I've tried it on. Give it a spin on the 
> current hardware and see if you like the experience. If your current Mac 
> is powered sufficiently, that might be a much cheaper route. You've got 
> a grace period before you have to activate the license, BTW, so you 
> might be able to try before you buy.
> 
> I can't comment on the hardware much. I'm using a Lenovo W500 at work 
> which is fine but probably outside your price bracket, and definitely 
> doesn't offer the battery life.
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> On 01.08.2011 10:07, Paul Maddox wrote:
>> Guys,
>> 
>>  My mac is now really pissing me off, the new MIDI interface keeps
>> dropping bytes and misbehaving. The machine sometimes recognises
>> external drives in some windows but not others and the whole web
>> browser just sucks ass. no way in hell I'm ugrading to the latest OS.
> _______________________________________________
> music-bar mailing list
> music-bar at lists.music-bar.org
> http://lists.music-bar.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/music-bar