Apple ® section

MacBook Pro - Day Two

I didn't do anything beyond Terminal and Firefox until late in the afternoon when I took a break to play a little poker. I had been playing for perhaps half an hour when my mouse froze.

Almost all applications have keyboard shortcuts, but if you don't know them ahead of time, a sudden freeze like this can leave you helpless. My keyboard still worked: alt-tab cycled through applications and alt-command-escape brought up Force-Quit, but other than that I was impotent. I watched helplessly as a good hand timed out and was folded automatically.

I closed the MacBook cover to put it to sleep. Sometimes awakening from sleep can fix silly problems, so it was worth a try. I have noticed that the MacBook takes a little longer to respond to a closed cover than my iBook does, and that the "sleep" light (a pulsing led that indicates sleep mode) is harder to see in ordinary light.

By the way, the back lit keyboard came on as the room darkened - that is a nice feature. I also found on-line that the new Macs can be put into what Apple calls "safe sleep mode" and Windows folks would call "hibernation" - the machine is really powered off, but will restore to its previous state upon rebot. I haven't tried this yet, but How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac seems to have all the details.

Well, opening the cover didn't help the mouse. I tried again, a little longer, and this time the mouse was restored. I played a few more hands, and it happened again. I gave up.

This is probably a Rosetta bug. The software I was using is a Power PC binary so it has to go through Rosetta translation. A little searching on-line shows that some other apps cause similar problems. No doubt either Apple will fix the problem or the apps will be recompiled as Universal Binaries (apparently that's usually fairly easy). In the meantime I'll have to learn the keyboard shortcuts - I hope Raise Pot isn't easily confused with Raise All-In.

1 comment

More Articles by Anthony Lawrence - Find me on Google+

Click here to add your comments




Wed Mar 1 23:32:28 2006:   TonyLawrence


Hmmm.. played for 90 minutes today, no repeat of freezes.. strange..



Don't miss responses! Subscribe to Comments by RSS or by Email

Click here to add your comments

If you want a picture to show with your comment, go get a Gravatar

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.