Visiting a Mac store...

A friend of mine gave me the idea to go to a Mac store and see if all computers had the same problem - so I did.

Both the new 15" and 17" Mac Book Pro (those with the multitouch) had the problem, the tested iMac and Mac Pro did not have the problem, and the normal Mac Book, Mac Book Air and older versions of Mac Book Pro wasn't tested.

To trigger the bug here is an updated description:

1. Set the dock to autohide.
   
2. Open Excel.
3. Press the plus sign so Excel fills out the main monitor (the one with the dock)
4. Change the zoom level to 150%.
5. Ensure that the formula bar is visible.
6. Drag the formula bar to the bottom of the screen.
7. If the computer doesn't freeze directly (the UI) test to drop the formula bar at the bottom and then start to drag it again and move it quickly up and down at the bottom left portion of the Excel window.

When I first got the bug verified on one of the computer one of the employees gave me the obvious answer to why it crashed, "typical Microsoft" I wish that would have been the reason but she didn't give me a chance to explain the problem and I was not interested in proving her wrong at this time.

3 out of 4 applications has malfunctioned

See the picture above for my first experience of typing in Word for Mac. Word crashed while I was typing, this was however not the same bug as before since I was able to force quit the application and the rest of the computer seems to work as normal. Hard to know if there is any connection with the other problems I been having. The problem might also been an effect of losing my Internet connection for a while, anyhow I'm looking forward to my copy of Tiger or the new release of Leopard whatever happens first.

Application used for more then just test:

1. Eclipse - No identified bugs
   
2. Safari - Froze the computer once
   
3. Parallels - Turn the screen into garbage when settings display settings in Mac OS X while running windows.
   
4. Numbers - Froze the computer on basically every usage.
   
5. OpenOffice - Ran extremely slow and had to be terminated.
   
6. iOrdning - No major problem so far (some minor glitches like crash on exit)
   
7. Excel - Froze the computer when moving the formula bar to the bottom.
   
8. Word - Application froze while entering text.
   

Changing Wildcat

The bug evolved further, from specific cases that I have been able to reproduce the computer froze while I was surfing in Safari.

Enough is enough (almost) so I talked to the support and will get Tiger instead, I assume this is like when people downgrade from Vista to XP, guess the commercial is going both ways.... Well will try out Tiger while I wait for an update of Leopard. Should talk to after sales now and ensure that I can return the computer if the problem doesn't get solved.

The bug evolved...

I managed to reproduce the bug in Excel even without my external monitor which partly makes this bug worse then when it happened in Numbers. To trigger the bug in Excel I can have any spreadsheet (empty aswell). I maximize the window (+), change the zoom to 150% and then drag the formula bar down to the bottom of the page. I then drop the formula bar at the bottom and before I pick it up again and start moving it up and down at the bottom of the page so that the window resizes, after a few times the window manager is freezing with identical symptoms to the Numbers bug.

I just got of the phone with the support and I will return to them as soon as they open the second level support in Ireland after 9:00. I'm not up for a lot of more testing so I hope that they will be able to give me a prerelease of the new update of Leopard and I hope that that can solve the problem since the other alternative will be to return the computer since I can't really work with a computer that crashes on every other applicaiton I'm using.

-- Update

Talked to support again and there was nothing they could do for me, tried to find out if I could turn of the hardware acceleration but they didn't know of anything like that.

While searching the net I found that there has been a simular problem with the new iMac:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5778210

Still haven't decided what to do, but to get an iMac doesn't seem like an alternative :-P.

What's next?

So I managed to get after sales to give me a refund towards buying Microsoft Office in expectation that that would solve the problem...

Since last I have managed to transfer my information onto the replacement Mac which took about 4-5 hours. When finally everything was working it was however a quite neat migration process if however slow.

I have stopped using Numbers and started to play around with Excel instead, guess if I lost my breath when I got a similar fault in Excel, this time it wasn't while I was working in the document but when I rearranged the windows instead. Wonder if Vista is a good choice of OS? All I wanted was a computer that was working, how hard can it be?!

To be continued....

The supports knows about the fault...

... but have no solution until an update of the graphical drivers is released which can take between one to six month if not longer.

They thought that using openoffice was a sufficient workaround for the time being, and I do agree that what I have been using in the past but that's not the reason I bought iWorks and Numbers? Have to see what after sales can do to try to restart my Mac experience in a better manner.

Any excel file can cause Numbers to freeze Mac OS X interface

After yet another discussion with the support have I tested to create a completely new file within Numbers and exported that as an Excel file which I then continued to edit on after reopened it. The spreadsheet originally only contained one column with dates and then I added some text in a few cells.

The bug was shown after adding some lines (two for example) and inserting information in the shown schema. The bug is present only when I have my external monitor connected.

If anyone likes to get the excel file to test the problem feel free to sent me a message.