I Got Tiger

I recently purchased a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. But rather than getting the $129 stand-alone package and installing it over Panther on my 6 year old Blue & White G3, I opted for the $2000 package in which Tiger is delivered preinstalled on the hard drive of a dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5.

This machine is amazingly fast compared to my previous one. Since both the machine and the OS are new, I have no idea how the OS itself compares to Panther. But using the G5 for the last couple of weeks has been an absolute joy.

...Except for a few problems. There's this weird bug I've encountered in which interface sound effects stop playing. In other words, there's no longer a sound effect when an item is moved to the Trash, or when the Trash is emptied. It's not a general audio problem, because I can still play music, watch video with sound, and play games with sound effects with no problem. It's just interface sound effects. And it's not just the Finder, either. Mail doesn't play an alert when new mail is received.

The most disconcerting thing about this problem is that the only way to fix it seems to be to reboot the machine. I've been using OS X ever since 10.0, and I think that this is the first bug that I've seen that can be fixed by rebooting, but not by logging out and then logging back in.

I think that the bug might be triggered via Fast User Switching. Until I got the G5, I've been using OS X the way that I believe Apple expects most home users to use it. There was only one account that had Administrator privileges, and it was also my personal account, which I used all the time. When I set up the G5, I decided to use a different approach, which I've heard recommended by others. I created an Administrator account that would only be used when it was needed, and a personal account which does not have Administrator privileges. So while migrating software from my old machine to the new one, I was switching between both accounts frequently. I believe that this somehow causes the sound bug.

I've seen another problem as well, which so far seems to coincide with the sound problem, so I can only assume that they are two symptoms of the same underlying cause. When the interface sounds don't play, the machine also won't go to sleep. At least, not on its own; I can put it to sleep manually just fine. But I have it set to sleep automatically via the Energy Saver panel, and it won't do so when the bug is in effect. Again, both problems are fixed after a reboot.