I love the fact that where Windows gives you a nasty raw unintelligible text-mode screen dump when it curls up its toes with the famous Blue Screen of Death, Apple's GCOD is in a lovely animated anti-aliased drop-shadowed graphic style. Fantastic! It even crashes beautifully.

I'd rather it didn't fucking crash, though.

So is it the RAM I put in? It's supposed to be 100% compatible (although the RAM specs are particularly stringent for the Mac Pro, so perhaps the definition of 'compatible' has been stretched by the retailers or manufacturers). A dodgy CPU? Over-temperature? A bad bit of software?

Until this morning, when the damn thing was cold and silent having thrown in the towel some time overnight, I suspected Parallels, since it has definitely caused real-time crashes when I've tried to use the USB functionality. But I'm not so convinced any more, given that Parallels wasn't running last night. Then again, some reports I've read say that Parallels screws the machine up so badly it won't boot again properly until booted into safe mode and Parallels is uninstalled. So perhaps it is that. It's certainly time to consider switching to VMWare's version of Parallels (Fusion) to see if it's less unstable (albeit still in beta).

I started running Apple's temperature monitor a few weeks ago (I was expecting 3 or 4 sensors... there are 23) and nothing is too hot.

In any case, the 20-odd times I've had to restart the damn box in the last 2 months or so underline the fact that when it all comes down to it, any platform can be as infuriating as any other.

--