[Commentary] Crash a Servoy party

Over the past week I have had the pleasure of experiencing one of Apple's most pronounced hardware failures to date. Since there isn't a scientific explanation yet to why my two month old intel MacBook randomly powers down I am convinced a family of contentious gremlins moved in. And every time they have a heated argument there goes the power.

Apparently there is quite the gremlin epidemic going on and to Apple's credit it took me all of 20 minutes on the phone from start to finish to get a brand new replacement computer shipped out to me. (After they open it and test the computer out for several days to make sure the gremlins haven't gotten to that one. They don't trust what is coming off of the factory line apparently.)

In spite of 100+ complete crashes, different memory configurations, and a new hard drive one thing has remained constant — Servoy is completely immune to this kind of abuse. I typically have from three to seven instances of Servoy developer open with Sybase and MySQL backends and you would think that repeatedly switching the lights off on things would have some kind of effect.

Nope! Once I manage to get the computer back up and running for more than a few minutes Servoy just pops right back open and I resume right where I left off. In contrast I will leave you to guess what condition my Filemaker files are in. I will just say that it ain't pretty. Good thing I only open Filemaker to convert something "up" to Servoy.

If you don't believe me, feel free to go buy yourself a MacBook and do a Servoy crash test yourself....

Comments (5)

Marcel Trapman 2006-07-19

So, you have managed to confuse me. Made my dreams miserable. In fact you made my belief in the mac crash... Was this an advise to keep on developing in Servoy because it is crash resistant. Or is this an advise to wait a little before I am going to buy the MacBook.. Are you talking MacBook or MacBook Pro? Help, I don't know what to do anymore :)

David Workman 2006-07-20

My life has been miserable...what do I care about your dreams? :) Bottom line MacBook here. I know three other people with MacBooks and one of them had the same exact problem. A deluge of forum posts on the issue so not just a fluke. The damn thing is so fast though I would take my chances if I were you anyway!

Graham Greensall 2006-07-21

Marcel, don't despair - you can live your dreams happily. Get a MacBook Pro with biggest screen, max RAM and fast HD. Had mine about 6 weeks and just about everything runs very fast, screen is superb, fans quiet and it's never crashed - in fact its probably stable enough to run Filemaker on :) Parallels/XP Pro also adds a great dimension for checking GUI differences between the OS's. David was obviously saving cashflow for the Bars at Sevoy World by getting a cheap little MacBook. My recomendation is to get a real mans machine - with 17" you'll never have to worry about puny arm muscles again.

Marcel Trapman 2006-07-24

Hi Graham, thanks for the thumbs up! That was exactly what I had in mind... However, I heard about the Dual Core2 processors coming to the market. So I guess I am goin to wait a little longer before buying the beauty :)

none 2006-07-25

Trouble is that when/if they launch the Dual Core2 units in a few months time you really should wait rather than gamble on the quality of the initial production units. But by them MacRumours will be talking about the Triple Core3 model and you'll have to wait again . . . . . . . . .