Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/12/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>I did like Michiel suggested and restarted my laptop.
>
>I froze up again today, but I didn't loose anything today either after
>rebooting.
>
>I was wondering if a Mac had similar problems. I was perfectly willing
>to chalk it up to the operating system (XP).
>
>I'm kind of afraid of mounting my external disk from my desktop on my
>laptop, even though I need to. I have too much on it to take any
>chances. I'll just have to sit in front of the desktop and work, I
>guess.
>
>Thanks Allen.
>
>Daniel
>
I use Lightroom on Macs. 2 of them. One a MacBook Pro (Intel
processor) and one a Quad G5 PPC processor. When I got Lightroom, I
used it on both machines, but after while it would freeze up on the
G5 tower, and corrupt the catalog. I made backups regularly, and
could hobble along, but it was a pain. I then started thinking about
the way it froze up, and what might be at issue. I suspected a RAM
issue. I ran various hardware tests, and all were OK, but I ran them
from the MacOS, which locks in a fair bit of memory for itself, so it
can't test all memory. I then used a small Unix utility, memtest,
which allows me to test more of the memory, and do it quite
thoroughly.
I ran it for a 5 days, and at the end found one set of chips that had
a problem. They were the ones that had come with the machine. It had
been an Apple refurbished machine, and I now suspect that the
original owner had had some similar issue which no one had been able
to pinpoint, so they took it back, had checked it as well as they
felt they could and sold it again.
In any case, they were only 512k modules, so I tossed them and put in
some others, and now have a total of 12Gb.
No crashes; not one in maybe 200 hours of using Lightroom over a
couple of months. Without a doubt, bad RAM was at fault. It was
subtle, and took some effort to find, but now things are fine. My
MacBook Pro never had a problem, with 3Gb of RAM.
With 12Gb of RAM, the G5 now flies in Lightroom. Before I had 5Gb,
but the new RAM makes a huge difference and Lightroom does all its
stuff in the background very quickly.
There are still a number of things I don't like about it, but it's
now my main work program. I still prefer iView as a cataloging
program, but (astoundingly!) since Microsoft has bought it they
haven't updated anything worthwhile, so it can't read the new file
formats. While the program was shareware, it got updated ASAP; when
it went commercial, it got updated within a month of new formats
coming out. Now MS has had it and it hasn't been touched in over a
year. It can't read M8 files.
--
* Henning J. Wulff
/|\ Wulff Photography & Design
/###\ mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
|[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com