AARGH!

[Victor]

I know this topic has been beaten to death, but not lately. When you get "this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" that means your program is trying to use memory allocated to another program, right? So removing the other program, if you know which one it is, will solve the problem, right?

Hard drive went bad. After a fresh reformat and reload, IE 5.5 gave me this message, and even though I don't really do much on the Web, I HATE being offline! This is the first time I haven't been able to fix this problem, or I should say it took longer than usual. Started fooling around with everything at my disposal til it finally cleared up, but I never did figure out why. The last thing I did was remove a sound driver.

This doesn't happen to me very often, I just hate the feeling of helplessness that it creates. So what can you do besides sit there with your thumb up your a$$ when this happens? God forbid the error message should specifiy which program is in conflict. There must be some kind of memory management utility out there that would actually do something. God knows I've looked.

[Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson )]

Originally posted by Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson ):
YEA Yea yea Wintel computers are great!!!!!
Never a problem, work all the time, no viruses, never crash, pleasure to work. We never ever have a thread on this forum about some wintel problem every month yadda yaddda yadda stay the course stay the course :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: I know what I know I know what I know. I don't want to switch blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ;)

Mac's WORK simple
The Mac Mini is going to convert more PC users and that is a fact simple. Buy Apple stock smile.gif Victor try a new browser it will only cost ya $499.00 ;)

[Ed Harrow]

Originally posted by Victor:
...you two can kiss my a$$. ...Heh, heh, heh. What goes around, comes around.

[Donn]

Victor, you are a perfect candidate for a Mac. Like the Commodore sez..."they work simple." Believe me, he knows simple.

[Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson )]

Not just simple, DIFFERENT :D

http://home.epix.net/~tjwagner/bg-ad.jpg

[ 01-24-2005, 08:08 PM: Message edited by: Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson ) ]

[High C]

Ed knows, but he's not gonna tell ya... :D

[Victor]

Joe, you must be the only guy on earth with an Apple that hasn't crashed. I hear they do it all the time. FYI, I'll give you a hundred bucks if your fancy-schmancy Apple can do anything my little POS can't do just as well, and faster. This is the first time I've had this problem in 3 years, and I did clear it up. It just took longer than planned, and annoyed the hell out of me that I still I had to use a scattershot approach to fixing it.

God forbid somebody might come up with some useful information. As usual on this forum, if you don't have anything useful to say, get snide. You can kiss it too, Ed.

On first load my OS uses 30 megs. That means it's all in memory, boyz. You can keep your big fat processors and your big fat drives, I'll still run circles around you.

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

Now there's a method of encouraging help from others I hadn't thought of. :D

[brad9798]

My mac systems crash about as often as my windows system- not very often.

Yes, with all due respect, Joe is the only person I've ever met that has never had a crash on his mac os ... I wish I knew his secret, truly.

-------

BTW, pmj, I thought you knew all the ways to entice folks to help, but I'm glad victor was able to show you another! ;) :cool:

[Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson )]

Brad are ya running OS X jaguar ? Im curently on Panther waiting for Tiger
http://www.4osx.com/gallery/data/505/3659screenshot-med.jpg

It looks sooooo pretty so pretty ;)

Up until I got the new Powerbook G4 I was on an iBook G3 for 3 years. When I say on I mean ON. I mean I never shut the thing off as evidence of my 10,000+ post :D I just closed the lid and put the laptop to sleep. Yes it NEVER EVER crashed. The new laptop had a minor hiccup when I was loading it up with tons of software and I had the newness Gods attack me and I had to :eek: restart. Now I treat it exactly the same as the iBook I had. My wife is still using a first generation G3 powerbook ( code name Wallstreet ) Still running OS 9.6 like a top 5 years later. She is in the process of transporting files from the old laptop to her new big powerbook G4.

Hey Victor I would take your $100 name your apps and be able to prove they are currently running on your computer now. Also honestly I do not mean to be overly snide. I feel your pain I see it all the time in my office people always complaining about there PC and problems as my little laptop keeps humming along. So it is out of concern that I want to show you the light. Like I said its more than a couple of times a month that we have this kind of thread on this forum you just happened to be the tail end of this month. I honestly wish I could help you but I'm not Donn or Meerkat when it comes to PC's. hey but if you had a mac you wouldn't need their help OR mine smile.gif

Edited to add: Ohh in the effort to maintain full disclosure I did have a fatal crash with my last iBook :eek:YUP I did SHOCKING isn't it ;) I had it in my briefcase heading home from work in the Jeep one afternoon. I ummmmm decided to take the 4 Wheeling mud back woods way home. When I took the iBook out of my Zero Halbutron briefcase and opened it up the screen was cracked :rolleyes: But the OS was still operating Sad to say eventually the screen just died and faded to black. I plugged an external monitor to it and wouldn't ya know the HD was still kicking . :D

[ 01-24-2005, 11:00 PM: Message edited by: Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson ) ]

[Larry P.]

Joe how could you do that to an Ibook :( . All I can say is that I have used computers for 20 years or so I started with a TI 99 4/A, moved to an IBM using dos at work, switched to wimdows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP home and Pro. Last october I bought my first MAC an Ibook running OS X Panther and it is without a doubt the BEST OS and hardware I have ever used (although I still love that old TI)

[Victor]

Sorry I got so snotty, I was still steamed. I know Wintels are crap, but it's not just because of poor design. Most of them are loaded with programs that no one uses, or with remnants of programs that were only partially removed. And of course most Wintel users have no idea how they work, and don't want to know either. I'm sure the Apple's a more elegant machine.

This industry is churning product, and most users seem happy to run out and buy new rather than fine-tune what they've got. It's like abandoning your car when the Check Engine light comes on. That's OK with me, it gives me a lifetime supply of reliable machines that cost practically nothing.

In all this time no one has come out with a memory management utility that would deal with this problem. All the sites I've visited say it could be so many things they don't know what to do about it.

How bout that Google, though? In response to the query "memory management", 2.9 million returns in 1.9 seconds. How the heck do they do that?

[ 01-24-2005, 10:44 PM: Message edited by: Victor ]

[Ed Harrow]

Originally posted by Victor:
...You can kiss it too, Ed. ...
Originally posted by Ed Harrow:
[QUOTE]You don't know me very well, do you...

If you're man enough to drop em, I'm man enough to kiss it, only I get to call the location. ...But Victor, see, I already told you I would... Seems you're the non-cooperative participant.

When ya gonna accept?

[Victor]

Nothing like posting on topic.

[Joe ( Cold Spring on Hudson )]

Seriously, Victor I'm glad ya got it up and running, nothing like being off line for any amount of time ;) :D

[Nicholas Carey]

Originally posted by Victor:
In all this time no one has come out with a memory management utility that would deal with this problem. All the sites I've visited say it could be so many things they don't know what to do about it.
Victor, Victor, Victor…

[puts on hat of software engineer]

When your application craps out with a dialog box that says "this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down", it means that an application, not the operating system, has tripped a hardware interrupt of some sort. Usually, it will be something along the lines of a zerodivide (division by zero is undefined and throws a hardware exception), a floating point overflow/underflow (also throws an exception), or some sort of memory access error (e.g., your application is trying to read/write unallocated memory, or memory that is allocated by another process, but the process represented by the failing application lacks the prerequisite access. One of the most common causes of this error is an attempt to read/write from the address located by a null pointer (that would address 0x00000000), which is ordinarilly read/write protected. A null pointer is usually what is returned on failure by any number of system calls, including the memory allocator. Or you can might get a null pointer when you try to resolve a soft link, such as when a DLL is loaded, if, for instance, the DLL isn't found, or it's the wrong version of the DLL.

Note that this sort of thing is not a problem with "memory management": memory management is working as designed. It is a problem with the application itself. Something has failed and the developers failed to check for error, before using the results of the call that failed [Since it's IE5 that crapped out on you, you can blame the Minions of Bill for this one. Quality, in the form of defensive programming, at Micro$loth, is not Job #1 (it's not at Ford, either, but that's another discussion). Shoving it out the door is.

Anyway, you say that you reformatted the hard drive and reloaded. Did you "reload" from a backup, or did you get out the install disks and start over from scratch? Once you reloaded, did you then reapply all the various service packs and hot fixes for Windows gaping security holes? If so, did you apply them in the correct order (it's pretty easy to install them in the wrong order, which can hose things pretty spectacularly.) There's a number of different ways in which parts of your system can get regressed from what a service pack or hotfix has applied, due to the fact that every application tends to install some version of some system file or driver. The general sequence is (1) install the base operating system, (2) install your applications, (3) apply any service packs to our applications, such as Office, (4) apply the latest service pack for the operating system and (5) run Windows update and apply any recommended hotfixes.

Also, what OS are you running (Win95, Win98, Win2k or WinXP?) Also, what do you do to reproduce the failure? Is it a particular web page that gives you the error, or a particular media type, or do you get it on startup?

[Nicholas Carey]

WRT to OS X and [non-]crashes, We've been running OS X for some years now, with nary a crash (kernel panic in *nix-speak). Applications will occasionally crap out (usually MS Office or Opera) or hang in a spin loop, but the system itself just keeps on ticking (nothing kill(1) can't fix). Judging from the way allocated/free memory changes over time while Opera is running, Opera's got some sort of memory leak.

But none of those problems are OS X problems: they're application problems.

[Victor]

Well thank you Nicholas that's the first useful response I've seen. My mistake perhaps in loading the patches first. This is IE 5.5 for cryin out loud, how many millions of them are out there? Everything else ran fine. Cleared it up by removing an audio driver that kept reloading on every reboot. After the last removal it never showed its ugly head again.

This is precisely why I stay away from new releases. If an old horse like IE 5.5 can crap out like this, why in the world would I want to pay real money for anything new from MS?

[Garrett Lowell]

I love it when someone has a problem with their app, then admits they loaded it wrong, and that another program may have been interfering with their particular app, and STILL they blames it on MS. We have a number of names for these types of "errors":

RTFM error--Read The Fargin Manual
PEBUAK error--Problem Exists Between User and Keyboard
"I-D Ten T" error (or ID10T)--self explanatory

[Larry P.]

Yes all the problems with MS and associated apps is due to users.

:rolleyes:

[Victor]

One of us doesn't know what he's talking about, Garrett. I've done this many times with no problem.

Hey Nicholas, is it safe to assume the program that's loaded first is going to lay claim to the memory?

[ 01-26-2005, 03:46 PM: Message edited by: Victor ]

[WWheeler]

AARGH -- Another pirate thread shot to computer talk. Avast and belay

[htom]

Not any more; there are too many ways for memory management to arrange memory use (including loading).

[Ed Harrow]

Originally posted by Victor:
You don't know what you're talking about, Garrett. ...Well, Garrett, at least Victor has indicated what you should say in response. ROTFLMHO!

[Victor]

Ed and Garrett, read htom's response above and get in the asskissing line.

[Meerkat]

Frequent episodes of "illegal operation" failures can suggest a bad hard drive and/or memory chip(s), especially if the problem was not common before.

IE is a major POC - switch to Firefox! smile.gif

[Meerkat]

http://www.4osx.com/gallery/data/505/3659screenshot-med.jpg

Dunno how to put it to you Jose, but your calendar is wrong - it's January, 2005, not November, 2003! :D

BTW, is it indicative of the brainpower of the average Mac user that the OS' name has to be mentioned no less than 4 times and take up over 25% of the screen real estate? Not even Windows thinks so little of it's users! :D

[ 01-25-2005, 06:18 PM: Message edited by: Meerkat ]

[Jayne Scott-Andrews]

"Rich Hall, computer assistance: may I help you?"

"Yes, well, I'm having trouble with WordPerfect".

"What sort of trouble?"

"Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden, the words went away".

"Went away?"

"They disappeared"

"Hmmmm. So what does your screen look like now?"

"Nothing".

"Nothing?"

"It's a blank. It won't accept anything when I type".

"Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?"

"How do I tell?"

"Can you see the c: prompt on the screen?"

"What's a sea-prompt?"

"Never mind. Can you move your cursor around the screen?"

"There isn't any cursor. I told you, it won't accept anything I type"

"Does your monitor have a power indicator?"

"What's a monitor?"

"It's the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it's on?"

"I don't know."

"Well then, look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it.
Can you see that?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Great. Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it's plugged into the wall."

"Yes, it is."

"When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?

"No."

"Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable."

"Okay, here it is."

"Follow it for me, and tell me if it's plugged securely into the back of your computer."

"I can't reach it."

"Uh huh....well, can you see if it is?"

"No."

"Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?"

"Oh, it's not because I don't have the right angle, it's because it's dark."

"Dark?"

"Yes, the office light is off, and the only light I have coming in is from the window."

"Well, turn on the office light then."

"I can't."

"No? Why not?"

"Because there's a power failure."

"A power....a power failure?.....Aha. Okay, we've got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came
in?"

"Well, yes, I keep them in the closet."

"Good. Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it.
Then take it back to the store you bought it from."

"Really? Is it that bad?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is."

"Well, all right then, I suppose... What do I tell them?"

"Tell them you're too f***ing stupid to own a computer."

:D

Just edited to add - this is NOT aimed at anyone... I just remembered someone sending it to me and wanted to share it, and this seemed as good a place as any...

[ 01-25-2005, 07:14 PM: Message edited by: Jayne Scott-Andrews ]

[Nicholas Carey]

Originally posted by Victor:
Hey Nicholas, is it safe to assume the program that's loaded first is going to lay claim to the memory?Nope. Windows (well, any real operating system, so count out DOS its spawn) are multitasking operating systems. That means that each 'task' running gets its own virtual address space starting at address zero and going up.

As different tasks (processes) swap in and out and make different demands on the system, virtual memory management takes care of paging stuff to/from the swap file, and mapping a particular process's virtual addresses onto real memory.

[Victor]

Hence it makes no difference at all whether you load one app first or the other. Or it shouldn't.

[Bruce Hooke]

Originally posted by Victor:
Hence it makes no difference at all whether you load one app first or the other. Or it shouldn't.By "load" do you mean launch or install? If the former then I'm guessing that it probably does not make a lot of difference; if the latter then it does make a difference because of things like different versions of DLL's shared by the various apps...

[Meerkat]

Originally posted by Nicholas Carey:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Victor:
Hey Nicholas, is it safe to assume the program that's loaded first is going to lay claim to the memory?Nope. Windows (well, any real operating system, so count out DOS its spawn) are multitasking operating systems. That means that each 'task' running gets its own virtual address space starting at address zero and going up.

As different tasks (processes) swap in and out and make different demands on the system, virtual memory management takes care of paging stuff to/from the swap file, and mapping a particular process's virtual addresses onto real memory.</font>[/QUOTE]:eek:

[Garrett Lowell]

Originally posted by Victor:
Ed and Garrett, read htom's response above and get in the asskissing line.It's called a sense of humour, Victor. You should look into it.

[Ed Harrow]

He can’t, Garrett. Victor is very limited by his Windows®.

[Garrett Lowell]

:D :D

[Victor]

I meant install Bruce. Maybe you're right. There are two small patches I use to stablize this OS. I usually load them first, then the display drivers, then the IE. It shouldn't make a difference which order you install things in but maybe it does. At least that's a plan for the future. It seemed to be a sound driver that screwed things up, who knows why. Don't Apples function the same way?

[Bruce Hooke]

I've run into various odd linkages like that, including one where installing a missing scanner driver fixed something that appeared to be pretty unrelated to the scanner or it's connection to the computer. As others have explained much more clearly than I can, there are lots of odd ways in which things can conflict and fail in Windows that are totally unrelated to memory allocation.

As to your question about Apples -- from what I've seen of them (which is not a lot) they are surprisingly different from Windows, especially when you get into these basic operating system functions.

[Meerkat]

Installation order absolutely does make a difference! :eek:

For example, consider the ramifications of installing your underwear after you put on your pants... ;)

[Larry P.]

Yes Apple uses drivers for certain things but based on my experience with BOTH systems OS X seems to handle installation much better. One major difference is that when you remove a program from os x its gone there are no hidden dlls or registry things left behind to cause problems at a later date.

Another major difference is that in X although individual programs my crash they don't take the whole system with them a frequent occurrence with MS.

[Jayne Scott-Andrews]

For example, consider the ramifications of installing your underwear after you put on your pants... .... You're cover's blown now, Meerkat ... and I thought you were just plain ol' Clark Kent :eek:

... "up, up and awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy "
;)

[Ed Harrow]

Originally posted by Victor:
I meant install Bruce. ...Does Bruce know this?

[Nicholas Carey]

Originally posted by Larry P.:
Yes Apple uses drivers for certain things but based on my experience with BOTH systems OS X seems to handle installation much better. One major difference is that when you remove a program from os x its gone there are no hidden dlls or registry things left behind to cause problems at a later date. The big difference is that in *nix (Unix, Linux, Solaris, AIX, OSX, BSD, FreeBSD, NextOS, etc.) device drivers run at the application level. When they crash or have a problem, they crash and get restarted. At worst, they take the application referencing the device with them.

In Windoze, though, device drivers run in kernal space as kernel extensions (ring-0, in Intel-speak). This means if a device driver craps out, it's likely to take the OS (and every running application) with it. As a side effect, putting device drivers in ring-0 means that it gets much, much, much harder to write them.

WRT to why sequence is important, it has to do with (1) versions of shared libraries/executables (DLLs/EXEs in Windows-speak), and (2) the quality of the installer written by the software vendor to install whatever software you're installing.

If the installer fails to properly check the version metadata (or they never bothered to add that metadata) and as a result, it blythely or incorrectly installs a version older than that which is already on the machine, bad things are likely to happen. Ditto if it installs a newer version, if the developers failed to provide backwards compatability. This problem is compounded by Windoze's astounding lack of security. In its default configuration, anybody and anything has read, write and execute permissions on system directories and executables &mdash; pretty much the equivalent of logging in as root and executing <span style="font-family:monospace;">chmod -R 777 / in the *nix world.

This is widely considered to be Bad Thing, somewhat akin to leaving the keys in the your M-B with the engine running and a big sign on the windshield saying, "Free!"

These problems, in conjunction with Microsoft's tendancy to allow anybody to distribute important stuff like the C runtime library, ODBC, and other stuff that in any rational system would be fairly well-controlled system files, encourages the problem.

It's really easy, given all of Microsoft's security failures (and even with the various Service Packs and Hotfixes distributed by Microsoft) to put your system into a non-stable, broken state by inadvertantly, and quite unintentionally from the software developer's POV, regressing one DLL or another to an version prior to that which other executables depend.

Welcome to the fun and exciting world of system administration.

As a contrast, in the *nix world, if you're an ordinary user&mdash;which you should always log in as, unless you're doing system admin tasks like installing software or running maintenance&mdash;the only thing you can possibly bollux up is your own account since you can't alter anything in the filesystem (with certain minor exceptions) outside of <span style="font-samily:monospace;">/~ (your home directory and its children).

In the Microsoft world, the equivalent would be that nobody but a system administrator would be able to alter anything in the file system outside of their 'My Documents' folder.

Also, in OS X, any executable&mdash;program or shared library/DLL&mdash; is actually a specially tagged directory/folder that allows the maintenance of every prior version within it. Any program that uses a DLL has the option of specifying at link time that it (1) wants the latest version, (2) a specific version or (3)the latest version more recent than version nnn.nnn.

[Meerkat]

Hmmm... I didn't know that OS X used a journaling file system! That's an option on other Unixes - in fact, there are a few different ones.