Blue or grey – it’s still a screen of death!

Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.

Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: On both systems they are almost never caused by the OS itself (except possibly new versions with bugs in them). The primary causes are third-party programs and drivers, particularly programs like Parallels that must dig very deep into the system to work. But it’s still a screen of death and it does happen on both machines — this makes it a little hard for me to understand people like Scott Bourne, who literally talk as though screens of death were something you never ever see on a Mac (not true) and that you see all the time on Windows (only true if you haven’t looked at Windows since Windows 95 and Windows Me).

This is no indictment of Apple — no OS can handle system-level programs going wonky. But it does make me feel a little sobered and a little more realistic, and it is also giving me one more reason to reconsider my move to Mac as a primary platform, given that I must work with a number of Windows programs because my income is based on them. Particularly, it’s another warning that using a virtual machine as a genuine working OS, rather than just for testing purposes, is really not such a good idea because it introduces a significantly higher risk of failure on several levels (whole OS is running within a virtual system that can fail, VM depends on another host OS, virtual drives are single files etc.).

Here too, it’s absolutely not because of any problem on the Mac as such. But if I’m going to work exclusively on the Mac I need to have Windows running at the same time. And if I can’t depend on that VM to be just as stable as it would be on a separate PC then I have a serious problem. On my working PC under XP I have not had a single BSOD or other major failure in at least three years, despite running test versions of our own software constantly. On Parallels under OSX I get a major failure of some sort around once a month. Even with backups, that’s too often by a factor of around twelve. So far I haven’t had any major data loss, but that could be just plain dumb luck.

In addition to this, I’m beginning to wonder how much sense it makes to run both systems at the same time. Because of the way I work I can do everything I need to do on the PC on its own, but I can’t do everything I need to do on the Mac on its own. Working on the Mac is nice but since it’s different, using both systems actually adds more work, it doesn’t make things simpler.

What I will probably end up doing is keeping the Mac for private stuff and doing all my work on a PC again. That’s a pity, because I much prefer to work on the Mac, but what I’m doing at the moment is creating more unnecessary work and an unacceptably high and also unnecessary level of security risks for mission-critical data.

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