Stability Not Leopard’s Strength
OSX Leopard has a lot of stability problems, but I suspect many people are like me in that they aren’t enough to drive me to another platform for development. Apple has got me as a user for the foreseeable future despite the aggravations. So I wanted to share two tricks that have helped me keep my machine going without reboots. I like to tote my mbp back and forth just sleeping it. It works most of the time. Sometimes it does not and these are the three problems I have seen. Having the laptop hooked up to a monitor/mouse/keyboard and disconnecting them at the end of the day seems to make these issues much more frequent.
Machine does not come out of sleep.
This has only happened to me a couple times but I know it happens more often for others. The only solution that I know of is to press and hold the power button and shut it down. Anyone found a solution for this? It seems to be a pretty common problem on Leopard from reading the Apple forums.
Desktop icons become invisible or stop working.
This happens all the time to me. The Desktop seems dead and won’t let you click it or see any icons but if you open up Finder and browse to the Desktop everything shows up normally. To “fix” this shut down finder by doing sudo killall Finder from the command line. It will restart itself after a few seconds and things will be back to normal. Might as well be restarting explorer with the Windows Task Manager 
Spaces/Dock/Expose/Active Corners malfunctions
These things can get pretty messed up. Active corners will stop working, or hotkeys will stop working, or animations/transitions will go away (making the usability pretty awkward), or a combination of these things. To fix this do sudo killall Dock from the command line. Once again a lot like restarting core stuff in Windows. This also seems to fix a problem I have where clicking links within other applications like Apple Mail stops automatically opening them in Firefox.
Snow Leopard is supposed to bring loads of stability and footprint improvements so perhaps this will fix some of the problem. I’ll show Apple how much I get aggravated by Leopard stability by, I guess, spending money on the next version of their operating system…
Robert Dyson said,
June 26, 2008 at 4:56 am
I’ve had ALL of these issues too, pretty regularly. I thought maybe it was my inferior 32-bit architecture, but no.
gtuhl said,
June 26, 2008 at 5:05 am
Yeah these are all regular (except the first one which is uncommon) for me too. I have to kill either the Dock or the Finder pretty much every day when I wake the machine up after sleeping it to/from work. Its a bit lame but on the other hand both services restart in seconds and it prevents having to reboot.