I just upgraded to Apple’s OS X Leopard operating system and ran into a problem that seems to be causing quite a stir. To Apple’s chagrin the problem has been dubbed the “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD). It appears that the new OS has a few problems and unfortunately they stall the computer at the point when it is displaying the signature blue startup screen. Windows users may be familiar with the BSOD. I’m not sure about all versions of Windows, but most display a blue screen with an error message on it when the operating system encounters an error from which it cannot recover. They are a bad thing. And while the Leopard BSOD is not exactly the same as the Windows BSOD, it is a bad thing as well.

Apple has adopted an age old technical support tactic at this point: blame some other party for the problem and walk away. The current response from Apple can be found here where they blame some third party software called “Application Enhancement.” I, however, have no idea what that software is and am certain it is not installed on my computer. Still, I ran into the BSOD on my computer.

This is how it went down for me. I would try to restart the computer only to wait nearly 20 minutes to see a login screen, and when it did finally appear it had no memory of my user account. It presented me with “Other. . .” as a user name and when I changed it to my user name and entered my password it failed to log in. This went on for hours, providing me plenty of time to think about the situation and try to research the problem. Having dealt with OS X for a couple of years now in a networked environment I have learned that it has some issues when it comes to networking. So, when my computer finally presented me with usable login screen I was prepared with a well simmered hunch about a possible “cause” of the problem. I had altered my hosts file (/etc/hosts) so that OS X could see some other computers on my network using friendly names. I had a feeling that this networking related file change could have caused my computer to “crash.” When I checked my hosts file I found that I had entered the correct IP address but mistyped the name. This by no means should cause a computer so much trouble, but with OS X I was pretty sure this was the cause. I corrected the spelling and restarted the computer. Sure enough, problem solved.

During my online search for a solution I found out something that I hadn’t previously noticed. Apple uses an image of a computer monitor with the Windows BSOD on it to represent any Windows computer on the network – kind of childish in my opinion. The irony in this situation is that the only operating system I could get to run on my Apple computer was Windows. Go figure.