As regular readers know, I’m not one to take Mac troubleshooting sites as seriously as I used to. In one tragic case, one of those sources, which has had a couple of ownership changes, has managed to pretty much lose its hard-won reputation for accuracy.

These days, if they’re not just taking a few random system anomalies and turning them into serious problems of one sort or another, they are mostly regurgitating the material they find at Apple’s own support forums. Unfortunately, those forums are not actually vetted, but just offered as a reasonably open resource for folks to report problems and sometimes even get some answers by regular visitors. Apple doesn’t really make an effort to provide genuine support, though. They mostly provide that service as a place to vent and perhaps locate others who’ve solved the problem you’re having.

In any case, I think the people who conclude that Leopard was one of the buggier Mac OS X releases are just plain wrong. Each and every version has required several maintenance updates before things settled down. Sometimes they even shipped with show-stoppers, such as the tendency to corrupt the directory of a FireWire 800 drive. That was fixed pretty quick, though it sometimes required a firmware update from the drive vendor.

Leopard’s major contender was a Finder bug that might result in lost or corrupted data if something halted the process of moving — rather than just copying — a file from one drive to another. That, too, was fixed really fast, though it’s possible this was an issue of long standing that was only discovered when Leopard came out.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 7:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: Contender, Firewire 800, Firmware Update, genuine support, Leopard, Mac Os X, Mac Troubleshooting, Maintenance Updates, Night Owl, Show Stoppers, System Anomalies.