New to Mac OS. 2 problems encountered.

Got my shiny new MacBook yesterday. Played with it all night. Very impressed with the OS so far, but I did encounter 2 issues.

First was the system complete froze, mouse and everything. Had to force shutdown by holding power button. I was in the middle of viewing the screen setting. I thought OS X never freezes And this is on a fresh system, nothing installed, nothing changed in the OS.

Second was more serious. All of a sudden while surfing on Safari, the screen went nuts - lost all colors. The screen looked like it was showing what looked to be 4 colors only. Again I didn't mess with any of the settings yet at this point. I tried everything - reset PRAM, change resolution, color depth, calibrated the screen, nothing. The only thing worked was changing the color depth to 256 colors. Change it back to thousands or millions of colors, the OS instantly reverts to 4 colors.

After some messing around, I noticed this behavior was only in the initial user account I setup when I first opened the MacBook. When I logged off, the log on screen looked perfectly normal. As soon as I logged back on it goes back to 4 colors.

I solved the problem by creating a new user ID and deleting the bad one. Right now my OS X troubleshooting skill is zero. This is the only way I could work around the problem.

Any pointers as to what happened? Oh another thing, nothing I could do in Safari will force it to open links in new tabs, it will always open in a new window. Yes this is with the new user account, and after I enabled tabbed browsing and set it to open in new tabs instead. It was working fine with the 4 color user account.

 

Sounds like you had a bum install and possibly a hardware issue. Rarely does the OS lock up. Usually you get the spinning beach ball or a kernel panic. I would suggest powering down the machine and reseating the RAM and the HDD while you're there. If the odd problems persists I would do a clean install of the OS (good thing to do anyways to get rid of the bloat). After that it's time to visit a Genius.

 

Yeah Often times since my macbook only has 1 Gb i load too much running on the background and the browser will go beach ball for a few minutes, but it'll kick back in if I just leave it. I'd reinstall definetly! If it keeps up replace it

 

Re-install? you guys sound like such Windows users.
If the problem keeps up take a look at this site, it might have something for you.

 

You might try running the hardware test that is on a CD you got with it. See if that turns up anything.

 

Really? I was about to crack open those included discs and reload the OS, for fun Actually I'm going to check out X11 first, really mess things up before I reload the OS

Since I deleted the original user account, I haven't seen the messed up colors again. I highly doubt it's anything with the hardware. As I explained, when I logged off of that account, the colors were fine. I guess no one has seen that issue.. I shouldn't have deleted that account yet, before I show it to them geniuses at the Apple store.

The only other issue I have now is both Safari and Firefox lose connection to the net randomly. The wifi connection seems fine, I can ping google.com or whatever continuously when both browsers lose connection..

Another question. I downloaded Firefox. After I mounted the "drive", double clicked Firefox and the thing just starts. In the Mac OS, do you not have to "install" a program before you run it? I tried to dismount the firefox.dmg drive while Firefox was running and it didn't let me, indicating the Firefox process is still using the executable in the Firefox "drive". Is running a program in the Mac OS simply executing the executable file, no "installation (i.e. DLLs and other junk all over the HD) required?

 

Nopes, what you do is:

Download the Firefox .dmg file.

Mount the Firefox "drive". A window will pop up and the Firefox icon appears. Drag that icon into your Applications folder. There, its installed!

Eject the "drive" and you can delete the .dmg file.

Some larger applications will need an "InstallShield"-like installation, but most applications are installed this way. Very simple.