Apple 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Update Trouble

Upon trying to upgrade to the newest major update by Apple for OS X to 10.6.3 I had nothing but trouble.  Some Macs upgrade fine.  Others do not.

I always download the full combo update since I have hundreds of Macs to update it saves lots of time and bandwidth to just download the full update one time instead of a smaller update over and over again.  The combo update for the client is 713 MB.

When running it on my favorite iMac 24 which I use as my main workstation the GUI installer would fail within the first minute of the install during the “writing files” stage and had some useless error saying the installer had failed and that I needed to contact the software manufacturer (in this case Apple).  I tried all sorts of things and scoured the Internet as well as Apple’s site looking for help but since the update is so new there is very little info out there.  Hopefully this will help you if you’re having the same trouble!

Yet Another System Utility

I cleaned temp files and dumped cache folders and tried multiple accounts and ran cleanup utilities including YASU (http://jimmitchell.org/yasu/) which all helped the system but didn’t do anything for the update.  I even ran the software updater from the command line using “sudo softwareupdate -i -a” but all failed.

After about an hour of searching I found that if I didn’t close the installer after the error I could go to the menu bar and view the log file.  Silly me I knew it was there!  The log file told me that there was an error 23, too many open files in system.  There is very little info on this error 23 except that it is indeed too many open files in the system.  So after some more investigation I found the sysctl command.  By using sysctl kern.maxfiles you can see what your system is set at as far as the maximum allowed open files.  My iMac was at 2000 which seemed like more than enough but this was largest update I had attempted and I have LOTS of software on my iMac.  So I changed that value to 5000 using the command “sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5000″.  Understand this is done either under sudo or sudo su in a terminal window.

After changing the maxfiles to 5000 the updater ran without a hitch!  I’m not sure if I need to set that value back to 2000 but I’m going to leave it at 5000 since there should be plenty of system resources to handle it.  If I start to see system performance issues I will set it back to 2000.  I know most Linux systems are well under 1000 and some under 500 for max files so 5000 seems like overkill.

Please leave a comment if this fixed your issue or contact me if you need additional help!!

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Exactly how much faster are the new iMacs that were just released a few weeks ago?  The answer: They’re Not…

I was so excited to get the newest iMac and evidently was one of the first because my order needed to be modified from what I had ordered and upgraded to a comporable nextgen.  After moving everything over to the new iMac using Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html and awesome software BTW) I ran XBench (http://www.xbench.com/).  Now it’s important to note that I had already installed XBench on my old iMac and there were absolutely no changes prior to re-running XBench on the new iMac.

To my great disappointment the XBench score was lower on the new iMac!

As you can see the only place the new iMac scored higher than the old one was under the Thread test!

The NVidia GeForce 9400 is only PCI where the ATI Radeon HD2400 is PCI Express at full x16 so even though the ATI is an older chipset and has 128 MB less VRAM it still out perfoms the NVidia.  I should also point out that the VRAM on this NVidia chip is shared with system ram where the ATI on the previous generation isn’t.  This explains exactly why the new system was using more RAM right out of the box!

So, don’t go rushing out ready to trade in your iMac for the new ones because the bottom line is that they just don’t perform as well as expected!  The exception to this would be in the new 24″ iMacs.  At least get the new iMac with the GeForce 120 or 130.  These have dedicated GDDR3 memory and are much better chipsets.

If you have one of the new 24″ iMacs please post your XBench results here!  I would love to see how much better they perform than the 20″ iMacs.

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I just changed the comments setting to allow posting of comments even if the commentator is not registered. This will hopefully bring more traffic and add more spice to the site. Personally I would like somebody to comment on my Apple iMac predictions.

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When I asked my Apple sales rep if I should buy the current iMac or wait until a new one is released- he had the following to say, “I know there isn’t going to be a new iMac released this year… are you feeling me…?” This was his way of telling me that the new iMacs are going to be released very soon, most likely Q1 of 2009. more…

Popularity: 9% [?]