I don't think I'm doing PARTICULARLY bad, mean, naughty things. Originally, I was being a bit naughty - opening a file off this thumb drive, leaving it open while unmounting the drive and removing it, then coming back later and trying to save the file. That SHOULD have a more graceful failure mode, if it's meant to fail at all, but it didn't. But today on my laptop I was doing nothing untoward. I had these files open in SubEtha, left the room for half an hour, computer went to sleep, and when I got back and woke the computer up, SubEtha hung when I went to save the files. I just think it's odd that I was having the same problem with the same software (which is a freaking text editor - not exactly Matlab here) on two different machines within 2 days.
Somebody at work pointed out that it might be a problem with the thumb drive - I haven't done much work lately with locally saved files on either machine, so I hadn't tested that theory. I did a volume repair on the drive, just to cover that base.
I think that Macs are pretty good, solid machines 98% of the time. The other 2%, they're no better than Windows machines. There is a standard list of all-purpose fixit techniques that every Mac user should know: drag the preferences file for the offending application to the Trash, use the Disk Utility to repair permissions on the disk, know how to force-quit an app using keyboard commands. Lately I've been having a rash of weird problems that took some googling to diagnose, but most of them (like my problem with the Dock not responding) have a ready fix.
I would say that my 2-year-old desktop machine has far fewer issues than my Dell did at the same age. I've also been pretty happy with my iBook, but let's not forget that it had a serious booting problem (requiring me to boot from a startup disk and reinstall the OS) WHILE I was at a conference, with my system disks 3,000 miles away and my homework due in my prof's inbox that night, and I was extremely sad for the remainder of the conference. To be quite honest, they are not trouble-free.
Somebody at work pointed out that it might be a problem with the thumb drive - I haven't done much work lately with locally saved files on either machine, so I hadn't tested that theory. I did a volume repair on the drive, just to cover that base.
I think that Macs are pretty good, solid machines 98% of the time. The other 2%, they're no better than Windows machines. There is a standard list of all-purpose fixit techniques that every Mac user should know: drag the preferences file for the offending application to the Trash, use the Disk Utility to repair permissions on the disk, know how to force-quit an app using keyboard commands. Lately I've been having a rash of weird problems that took some googling to diagnose, but most of them (like my problem with the Dock not responding) have a ready fix.
I would say that my 2-year-old desktop machine has far fewer issues than my Dell did at the same age. I've also been pretty happy with my iBook, but let's not forget that it had a serious booting problem (requiring me to boot from a startup disk and reinstall the OS) WHILE I was at a conference, with my system disks 3,000 miles away and my homework due in my prof's inbox that night, and I was extremely sad for the remainder of the conference. To be quite honest, they are not trouble-free.
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zenspider, is that closer to the aforementioned case?
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