Re: 7 Places Where Mac OS X is Still Behind Windows

On 2005-07-27 21:48:39 -0400, Nicholas Buenk <morn@xxxxxxxxxx> said:

Snit wrote: 
"Nicholas Buenk" <morn@xxxxxxxxxx> stated in post 42e79090@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
on 7/27/05 6:47 AM:
And XP does, for all intents and purposes, freeze up solid on some
application crashes.  Even if technically the kernel is happy as a clam.

Yes well it can be hard to close an app if it's stealing all the CPU cycles and making it difficult to use the task bar or task manager to close it, yet the mouse will still move fine. I think it's some task scheduling problem, the crashing app probably gets into a loop or maybe something else, and eats up all the CPU cycles it can get making every other program run very slowly, well that's my theory.

This sounds very like what happens if a program is thrashing very badly. The task manager runs at a high priority, but if there's no memory to spare this does not help much.

I find Mac OS X degrades more gracefully in these case. I think it is the way Quartz puts rendering into application processes; there are fewer shared data structures, so there is more opportunity for one app to be scheduled while another gets paged in from disk. Of course it burns more memory also.

I find that overlays and 3d games can crash XP fairly easily too, but I think that's issues with nvidia's drivers.
I've had my ibook for a few weeks and yet to experience a crash that froze up the GUI or kernel.

This does sound like a driver problem. Apple has a practical advantage here, because they can avoid crappy drivers more easily.

.

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