I’m speechless ! Just had my mac crash and require a restart (panic) for the third time in about 20 minutes.
Looks like it’s related to a 10.4.10 update that has caused problems with wifi when running on battery power. Plugging the power cord back in seems to have stabilized the situation.
For a few minutes I thought it was Firefox related, since that’s what I was using when the crashes occurred. I tried out Camino for a bit ( it has been a while since I last used it ) — and it’s really a slick browser. Only thing holding me back from using it full time is the lack of plugin support.
Back to this buggy OS X update. As one user, tele_player, on the apple support forum put it:
> …and this is better then Windows? Somehow I am
> starting to feel like I bought into the marketing
> hype of Apple products… =(
Right now, it doesn’t look better than Windows, but a screwup like this is actually VERY unusual.
Let’s hope we see a quick fix soon.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
I had this same thing happen on my Mac Mini a while back. Not sure what caused it. It only happened once and hasn’t happened since. From what I remember the restart screen is transparent so you can see your ever precious data just behind the grey error message, but can’t do anything to save it! In some ways I think that makes it worse than the Windows BSOD.
agreed.
it’s a very brutal error / crash sequence with the screen slowly being shaded out.
I looked at the logs and it appears to be an airport driver causing the crash, so pretty certain it’s the wifi issue being discussed.
hi there, i was having the same problems aswell, i bought my macbook pro 17″ in january and found mac to be much better and much more stable than windows.
When i installed the 10.4.10 update, i found my macbook crashing alot and the wifi dying out aswell, but also a few other things happened, all my movies apparently were corrupted and were unable to be played by quicktime and my dock would act really strange sometimes!
So after 7 months of hectic usage i decided to back up all my stuff and reinstall mac os x on my laptop, once i did that i installed the 10.4.9 update instead of the 10.4.10, i havent had a single problem since! if your willing to do this then i suggest you give it a try because although you have to go through the hassle of reinstalling the os and the software, its an easy solution to ridding the mac of its problems!
i have sent an email to apple about the 10.4.10 update…no reply as of yet
@mandpeed —
glad to hear rolling back to 10.4.9 fixed the issues for you.
I installed an Airport update a few weeks ago, and have been solid ever since.
I also think the type of wifi network makes a difference. I’ve read on various forums that WPA caused more problems than WEP.
Either way, I’m disappointed that Apple hasn’t acknowledges the issue given how many people had problems.
Just bought a new iMac (alluminium) 20″ 2.4 three or so weeks ago. All fantastic then installed 10.4.10 update and now it keeps crashing and making a long low beep on startup (no ram) but then starts. Urgh…time to rollback perhaps. Cmon Apple this is why I switched from PCs!!!
@klaus.
Have you updated with the latest Airport update ? that fixed the issues for me.
Also try changing up your wifi network to WEP if it’s on WPA – I’ve heard from other people that it can have an impact.
Wait, I though Macs “Just Work,” and never break? Do you mean to tell me that the advertising is incorrect? *GASP*