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Apple/NVidia Driver Bug — Question Deleted
Joe Drago writes "I purchased a Mac Pro within the first week that they were available, and immediately upgraded to 3GB of RAM (knowing that OSX loves memory). When playing 3D games (World of Warcraft mainly), the game would Kernel Panic the machine if I had played it for a few hours, or if I swapped in and out of the game a few times, etc. I eventually found out (from an official Blizzard poster) that NVidia has a bug in their drivers that kernel panics a Mac Pro if any memory past the 2GB boundary is addressed in the driver. After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.' What's going on here? Is Apple trying to hide this bug, or is there something more serious going on between Apple and NVidia?"
Wow, I'm kind of surprised this popped up on slashdot (I figured it would get mentioned in a blog, at most, and forgotten about). I'm one of the admins on that forum, and can confirm that yes, we've been asked to nuke anything regarding nVidia, at least in certain contexts. One recent addition to our arrangement with them (to provide kernel drivers) involves some very restrictive IP deals that upper management has interpreted to mean we shouldn't even acknowledge certain kinds of bugs in a very specific area. It's my understanding that there are some serious showstopper bugs inherent to nvidia's platform independent core code that they really do not want releasing. Most of us think this is utter BS (and management being paranoid), fwiw.
:p
And yes, there are enough forum admins that I'm not too scared about 'leaking' like this. Note that I'm keeping the exact details secret
Apple and nVidia have both said, in public, many times, that in the specific case of Apple NV cards, the drivers are handled by Apple.
This is what I would expect. When I bugged apple about their broken NFS support on servers they told us that engineers would get back to us. They never did. So I started asking on forums and mailing lists to see if I could get an answer and as soon as I brought it up the thread would get killed or the post would be deleted. Then when we had issues with MPICH it as the same dang thing. Eventually they admitted that MPICH2 works much nicer on Mac OS than MPICH 1 due to some network implementations stuff. Every time I brought it up on the forums though the thread would get killed. (For the curious, the problem that we where having was that an Apple server running NFS would always seem to forget about the last file in a directory when it cached the directory contents. so running "mkdir a; cd a; touch 1 2 3 4 5 6 ; cd .. ; rm -rf a" would fail one out of four times when being done over NFS. If you waited a half an hour then ran rm -rf a it would work great. This issue didn't happen when Mac OS systems mounted Linux NFS shares, but happened every time a Linux or Mac OS system mounted a NFS share off of a Mac OS based system. This was still happening to all of our PPC based systems as of last summer when we finally switched them over to PPC Linux, which made the problem go away)
I guess what I am saying is that it is not surprising. Apple has always nuked threads that made them look bad so why not this one?
Maybe he had it in his cache.
I spend a fair amount of time on the Apple forums. There's really nothing in your post that would seem to warrant such an action, at least compared to some of the trolls that pop up from time to time. But do bear in mind that the Apple forums are user-to-user support forums for Apple hardware and software. So asking to hear from an official source is a waste of time, because Apple-folk NEVER post on the forums. So in a sense, your post wasn't really aimed at allowing other users to troubleshoot an issue, and therefore not appropriate for the forums.
All that aside, I think its silly the post was deleted, since if this is true, it would be a serious issue. I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro this week (albeit with the Radeon card), and would certainly love to hear Apple's response.
The video card was standard in his machine. In other words... it was supplied by Apple. The drivers he is using are from Apple. Nvidia doesn't even offer Mac drivers on their site.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
NVidia will only directly support customers who purchase add-on cards. If you buy an Apple, Dell, HP, etc with an NVidia card, you need to work with the OEM to get a supported driver.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The article was about a Mac Pro, not a MacBook Pro, which is a laptop. The MacBook Pro has an ATI video card not a NVidia card.
Its WORSE than you think! The bugs are now rampant.
: :
Apple, like all software companies large and small, maintains an internal employee BugBase or bug database.
Other companies also include feature requests in such databases with acknowledgement from engineers.
It was a shining example from apple until a couple years ago some managers at Apple decided to irrationally ban thousands of Apple employees from being able to search and access Apple's bug database. This includes some of thier highest paid sales guys and highest paid "Systems Engineers" (not systems software engineers, but rather people that technically manage Fortune 100 company client accounts).
It is worse than Soviet Russia.
Apple did not hid or ban bugs, it merely BANNED ANYONE WHO NEEDS TO READ THEM FROM READING THEM EVER!
Now the database is a joke these years, as no one bothers to enhance the anecdotal evidence.
2 RETARDED QA EXAMPLES
Apples blatant bugs throughout history are legendary and none were caught by their QA because their QA
1 > NEVER ONCE SET SCSI DRIVES to ID #5 (7 choices, but every machine at apple QA was #1 and #2 I guess) so some PowerPC macs shipped with a bug that crashed when the hardware was issuing an interrupt cascading from a SCSI transfer interrupt on a SCSI drive with ID #5. traces were missing on the board. Apple Workaround was to cripple the OS and ROMS for that machine to make all SCSI smaller requests and not disconnect-reconnect to the bus. All the macs shipped defective.
2> NEVER HIRED PEOPLE for QA department familiar with commercial 300 dollar mac debuggers such as Viacom (ICOM) T/MON debugger, or Jasik's 'Mac Nosy The Debugger"; and only hired people for QA department familiar with crappy no frills free command line based "MacsBug" an ancient tool contracted out from Motorola and maintained sporadically by Apple for decades. MacsBug knowledge, even slight, is a requirement to pass hiring test of Apples gang of retards known as Apple QA department. I know many successful expert Mac software engineers that until a few years ago used T/MON so exclusively that they never once ever bothered to tolerate or use crappy Macsbug. and those were software engineers who thought nothing of spending 300 dollars on T/MON or 300 dollars on Mac Nosy The Debugger. And those were professional engineers! And they would have failed Apples retarded and inept QA hiring process based on use of a defective crappy free debugger.
3> Allowed a bug to go through where a timer chip was missing from the circuit board of a PowerPC mac used for network (802.3) usage and the code horrible stumbled along in a pathological state that ANYONE doing ANY form of file copying in Apples retarded QA department would have seen. All the macs shipped defective.
4> The left and right audio sources fed from the analog connector to the headphone jack of Apples best consumer multimedia macintosh at the time were backwards! Luckily QuickTime audio extraction was also buggy and reversed audio left-right so digital access was not flipped or discovered until Quicktime was fixed. QA did not catch it, QA did not even use a proper test audio CD. QA had no IQ to even imagine that stereo audio had a concept of left or right.
Etc, etc etc, There are hundreds of anecdotes of shipping failures that slipped past Apple's homogeneously low IQ, low imagination, no-creativity, zombie drone hordes at the laughable department of Apple QA (Quality Assurance) that the only way to fix it would be to gut it from the top and install some actual engineers to control the laughable department. Cutting off the FIELD employees at apple from the QA bug database and cutting off the service people and Systems Engineers (sales support dudes) only makes Apples QA five times more incompetent now.
I believe 100% that having memory buffer below 4 GB but above 2GB could fail in an Apple targeted Nvidia driver and believe 1005 that apple only tests with low memory and with 8 GB (now 16 GB) and nothing
My experience with Apple's handling of reported bugs has been _very_ bad. I reported dozens of problems, all with as much technical information as possible (I am a OS programmer myself) and none of them got any resolution whatsoever except for some time passing comments which mostly intended to make me understand they don't care about the bugs.
Of particular mention is a security bug - complete with stack traces, register values and other goodies. No response and the bug still exists after 3 releases of the product.
That was a joke. However, Slashdot deletes posts. In the past, they've deleted posts containing scientology info, leaked MS source code, and DeCSS source code when lawyers threaten to sue. They've also deleted page widening and xss hacks. They also delete posts when archiving stories. It's not confirmed, but there was a lot of rumors that Michael Sims was fired for (among other reasons) deleting posts critical of him.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As a default setting, I'd agree. However, this post, this post, this post, and perhaps this post, suggest to me that that isn't the most likely explanation, but rather that there is a cross-platform nVidia problem. (Just talking about what seems more likely, not what necessarily is the case in actuality.)
Tack that on to a reproducible core audio bug that makes the new dvd player app crash on certain disks. Reported that one till I was blue in the face.
How often do people take screen grabs of their posts to a forum? Was their expectation of it being removed?
Apple routinely deletes posts discussing known defects; it's very well known among Apple-using techies. Apple has done it in almost every case where there have been hardware defects of any kind. A classic example would be the iBook motherboard failures. I would imagine they do it to a)keep other owners from finding out and demanding fixes as well, b)keeping the press from finding out, and c)to defend themselves in any lawsuits which can claim "well, people reported it on your forums, so you must have known about it!" So...yes.
Web forums and mailing lists fuck with a classic PR/customer service move: deny all knowledge. I had a problem with speakers in my car, which in some cases had caused smoke or fire in this particular model. We called the car company, and each member of the forum, over a period of several weeks, was told "we have no knowledge of any other reports of problems with this model." They lied straight through their teeth. We later found out that over ten years before, a vehicle had completely burned to the ground because of the same defect, and company reps came out, looked at the car, purchased it back off the owner no questions asked, etc. They knew about the defect for over a decade and a half, and only after lots of bitching to NHSTA, did we get them to do anything about it. Oh, and dealing with NHSTA was another barrel of monkeys. Call their 800 number, and you get an operator who cannot do a single thing except ask for your address and send you the forms to report a problem. Once you do, they completely prevent you from speaking to the investigator at NHSTA to communicate further details et al.
Please help metamoderate.
On the Mac, the issue is as simple as upgrading your memory to 3GB, and can be done by any user.
On the PC if you upgrade your memory to 3GB, it won't happen, because you still have a 2GB per-process memory limit. You can get 3GB per-process memory limits with the switch you described, regardless of how much physical memory you have (remember virtual memory).
The thing is, you can't really toggle this switch by accident. You have to specifically set it in your boot.ini file. The only thing I can think of in your favor is I have never heard your problem before, and everywhere I see the 3GB switch described it sounded like it could be useful for the right apps... with no mention of this possible bug.
To summarize: Not the same thing. In Mac you simply install more memory. In Windows you have to crack open a system file and add an obscure setting to the boot configuration.
You guys should report these issues to the Month of Apple Bugs if you've not done so already.
I dont know why apple fanboys have to keep modding this to -1 as flamebait its INFORMATIVE and FACTUAL :
: :
Its WORSE than you think! The Apple bugs are now rampant.
Apple, like all software companies large and small, maintains an internal employee BugBase or bug database.
Other companies also include feature requests in such databases with acknowledgement from engineers.
It was a shining example from apple until a couple years ago some managers at Apple decided to irrationally ban thousands of Apple employees from being able to search and access Apple's bug database. This includes some of thier highest paid sales guys and highest paid "Systems Engineers" (not systems software engineers, but rather people that technically manage Fortune 100 company client accounts).
It is worse than Soviet Russia.
Apple did not hid or ban bugs, it merely BANNED ANYONE WHO NEEDS TO READ THEM FROM READING THEM EVER!
Now the database is a joke these years, as no one bothers to enhance the anecdotal evidence.
2 RETARDED QA EXAMPLES
Apples blatant bugs throughout history are legendary and none were caught by their QA because their QA
1 > NEVER ONCE SET SCSI DRIVES to ID #5 (7 choices, but every machine at apple QA was #1 and #2 I guess) so some PowerPC macs shipped with a bug that crashed when the hardware was issuing an interrupt cascading from a SCSI transfer interrupt on a SCSI drive with ID #5. traces were missing on the board. Apple Workaround was to cripple the OS and ROMS for that machine to make all SCSI smaller requests and not disconnect-reconnect to the bus. All the macs shipped defective.
2> NEVER HIRED PEOPLE for QA department familiar with commercial 300 dollar mac debuggers such as Viacom (ICOM) T/MON debugger, or Jasik's 'Mac Nosy The Debugger"; and only hired people for QA department familiar with crappy no frills free command line based "MacsBug" an ancient tool contracted out from Motorola and maintained sporadically by Apple for decades. MacsBug knowledge, even slight, is a requirement to pass hiring test of Apples gang of retards known as Apple QA department. I know many successful expert Mac software engineers that until a few years ago used T/MON so exclusively that they never once ever bothered to tolerate or use crappy Macsbug. and those were software engineers who thought nothing of spending 300 dollars on T/MON or 300 dollars on Mac Nosy The Debugger. And those were professional engineers! And they would have failed Apples retarded and inept QA hiring process based on use of a defective crappy free debugger.
3> Allowed a bug to go through where a timer chip was missing from the circuit board of a PowerPC mac used for network (802.3) usage and the code horrible stumbled along in a pathological state that ANYONE doing ANY form of file copying in Apples retarded QA department would have seen. All the macs shipped defective.
4> The left and right audio sources fed from the analog connector to the headphone jack of Apples best consumer multimedia macintosh at the time were backwards! Luckily QuickTime audio extraction was also buggy and reversed audio left-right so digital access was not flipped or discovered until Quicktime was fixed. QA did not catch it, QA did not even use a proper test audio CD. QA had no IQ to even imagine that stereo audio had a concept of left or right.
Etc, etc etc, There are hundreds of anecdotes of shipping failures that slipped past Apple's homogeneously low IQ, low imagination, no-creativity, zombie drone hordes at the laughable department of Apple QA (Quality Assurance) that the only way to fix it would be to gut it from the top and install some actual engineers to control the laughable department. Cutting off the FIELD employees at apple from the QA bug database and cutting off the service people and Systems Engineers (sales support dudes) only makes Apples QA five times more incompetent now.
I believe 100% that having memory buffer below 4 GB but above 2GB could fail in an Appl
Any responsible forum would simply move it to the appropriate sub-forum.
I don't know why Apple fanboys have to keep modding the following to -1 as flamebait : its INFORMATIVE and FACTUAL :
: :
----
Roporting bugs does not help, apple restricts access to reported bugs even to vital employees.
Its WORSE than you think! The Apple bugs are now rampant.
Apple, like all software companies large and small, maintains an internal employee BugBase or bug database.
Other companies also include feature requests in such databases with acknowledgement from engineers.
It was a shining example from apple until a couple years ago some managers at Apple decided to irrationally ban thousands of Apple employees from being able to search and access Apple's bug database. This includes some of thier highest paid sales guys and highest paid "Systems Engineers" (not systems software engineers, but rather people that technically manage Fortune 100 company client accounts).
It is worse than Soviet Russia.
Apple did not hid or ban bugs, it merely BANNED ANYONE WHO NEEDS TO READ THEM FROM READING THEM EVER!
Now the database is a joke these years, as no one bothers to enhance the anecdotal evidence.
2 RETARDED QA EXAMPLES
Apples blatant bugs throughout history are legendary and none were caught by their QA because their QA
1 > NEVER ONCE SET SCSI DRIVES to ID #5 (7 choices, but every machine at apple QA was #1 and #2 I guess) so some PowerPC macs shipped with a bug that crashed when the hardware was issuing an interrupt cascading from a SCSI transfer interrupt on a SCSI drive with ID #5. traces were missing on the board. Apple Workaround was to cripple the OS and ROMS for that machine to make all SCSI smaller requests and not disconnect-reconnect to the bus. All the macs shipped defective.
2> NEVER HIRED PEOPLE for QA department familiar with commercial 300 dollar mac debuggers such as Viacom (ICOM) T/MON debugger, or Jasik's 'Mac Nosy The Debugger"; and only hired people for QA department familiar with crappy no frills free command line based "MacsBug" an ancient tool contracted out from Motorola and maintained sporadically by Apple for decades. MacsBug knowledge, even slight, is a requirement to pass hiring test of Apples gang of retards known as Apple QA department. I know many successful expert Mac software engineers that until a few years ago used T/MON so exclusively that they never once ever bothered to tolerate or use crappy Macsbug. and those were software engineers who thought nothing of spending 300 dollars on T/MON or 300 dollars on Mac Nosy The Debugger. And those were professional engineers! And they would have failed Apples retarded and inept QA hiring process based on use of a defective crappy free debugger.
3> Allowed a bug to go through where a timer chip was missing from the circuit board of a PowerPC mac used for network (802.3) usage and the code horrible stumbled along in a pathological state that ANYONE doing ANY form of file copying in Apples retarded QA department would have seen. All the macs shipped defective.
4> The left and right audio sources fed from the analog connector to the headphone jack of Apples best consumer multimedia macintosh at the time were backwards! Luckily QuickTime audio extraction was also buggy and reversed audio left-right so digital access was not flipped or discovered until Quicktime was fixed. QA did not catch it, QA did not even use a proper test audio CD. QA had no IQ to even imagine that stereo audio had a concept of left or right.
Etc, etc etc, There are hundreds of anecdotes of shipping failures that slipped past Apple's homogeneously low IQ, low imagination, no-creativity, zombie drone hordes at the laughable department of Apple QA (Quality Assurance) that the only way to fix it would be to gut it from the top and install some actual engineers to control the laughable department. Cutting off the FIELD employees at apple from the QA bug database and cutting off the service people and Systems Engineers (sales support dudes) only makes Apples QA five time
What's immature is the attitude of Apple and policies they set for their admins. Companies should own up to bugs, or at the very least, not squash their discussion. For example, there are plenty of unhappy posts in the below forum (that yes, Nvidia helps moderate) and as far as I've seen, discussion of bugs is never deleted.
f =14
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?
You don't need to sign up for any special accounts that likeely require NDAs and other restrictions to discuss issues you're having.
Depends on your the time zone you have set for the forum. Some people will see that Cmdr Taco was a few hors too slow...
This type of problem of "random things breaking with large amounts of memory" isn't limited to Apple, unfortunately. I've got a Dell that doesn't wake from sleep because of its 2g of memory. They have a fix, but you can't get it publicly, and I haven't forced myself to wait through their tech support to get it from them yet.
The truth is, Apple makes junk and markets it well. Like you would expect an American company to do. All Hollywood, no moon.
File a complaint with BBB, after a while they can't delete history with BBB, you can always post their dealings with customers too, out to dry on the web.
http://bbb.com/
We've had a kernel panicking MacPro (4GB RAM/ATI 1900) in for AppleCare service for over 8 weeks now, they're still "testing" to figure out what's wrong.
I recently bought a mac pro along with the Parallels software so I could run windows as well. Sorry, no go. Parallels wouldn't work on the mac pro. No way will you ever convince me that Apple didn't know that one of their biggest selling points was a dud. Caused kernel panics. It works on the mac book pro but not the tower. Took the parallels software back and the apple rep had never heard about any problems with it.
Next I found that the keyboard has the worst key-bounce since the Shadio Rack Mod I. A bit of searching uncovered the fact that this has been going on a long time and Apple refuses to admit there is a problem or fix it. The best you will get out of them is another keyboard that does the same thing. There is one company that makes a decent replacement and when I tried to get one, they were out of stock indefinitely at the manufacturing level. hmmm.
I got the computer primarily for vector illustration using Adobe Illustrator. Guess what. Adobe Illustrator is completely unstable on the Mac Pro. This is another little tidbit of information that Apple seems to be squelching. I have found that memory management seems to be the main prob. keep the files small and save often. The program tends to go POOF! on a regular basis, but they do give me the opportunity each time to send a message to Apple telling them what slime-balls they are.
The list goes on and on, but my time to write it doesn't. Look...I knew I was buying a new system design and there would be bugs, but I would expect Mr. Jobs to have at least some modicum of professional ethics and be up front about MAJOR problems so people can make informed choices. These aren't small matters. Adobe CS2 and Parallels are two of the biggest selling points for the Mac. Neither one worked, they knew it and they lied about it. simple as that.
nVidia doesn't do Apple drivers. They may have their engineers help write them, but they don't support or distribute them. Apple is solely responsible for supporting the hardware they ship with their systems because they want it that way. You go to nVidia's site you'll find drivers for Windows of all varieties, Linux 32 and 64-bit, FreeBSD, and even Solaris, but no OS-X. So when you have problems with nVidias on OS-X, it's Apple that you need to talk to.
(Couldn't access the article's screen capture - site's bandwidth exceeded.)
I did some googling around, and it appears that Mac Pro systems have been known to Kernel Panic in a number of cases after a memory upgrade. Have you considered that you might have TWO (intermittent) problems?
According to this http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/Mac_Pro/mac_pro _ram.html upgrade memory should have larger heatsinks than standard heatsinked FB-Dimms. It has links to: memory test utilities, ECC correction reports, and most notably:
Questions:
Hope this helps!
You're freaking nuts, and ignorant to boot. DRM was not the reason Apple switched to Intel - there's nothing DRM-specific about the Intel architecture. Apple switched because IBM was not able to deliver a PowerPC laptop chip that met modern performance targets (yes, we all know the G5 was fast, but it also sucked down power and spewed out heat).
And, name me one thing that Apple has done that involves DRM, besides the iTunes Music Store. You can't, because they haven't done ANYTHING. And the music store only has DRM at the insistence of the record labels.
As for the iPhone, I can't argue there - I can only hope that Apple will come to its senses in the next six months, and open it up for public development.
This space intentionally left blank.
while it's not notebooks, the statement holds mostly true for quad g5 vs quad xeon:
http://www.barefeats.com/quad16.html
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
This seems to indicate that Photoshop runs significantly faster on the G4 compared to the Macbook Pro. (First Google search result for benchmarks macbook pro photoshop)
I can't speak to the Mac Pro issue. I'd read about that all over the place so it didn't seem "hidden" to me. But then I read sites like Ars, Slashdot and a few major Apple blogs fairly regularly. So I'm probably not the "typical" case. I never believe sales droids anywhere and personally am surprised anyone would. Having said that though, I've not found Parallels buggy in the least. It is a memory hog. Really, less than 2 GB is too little for anything serious. As for Adobe, that's been written about EVERYWHERE so often that I have a hard time believing that you couldn't find anything on that. Did you do any searching for benchmarks?
Apples just work. But that's it. They don't work super-awesome.
I'm just switching back to Linux (Ubuntu) (after more than two years with Mac OS), and I already love it.
And for the first time in its life, my trackball doesn't just have a scroll-down/up button, but can use the whole wheel to emulate the Mighty Mouse.
And man it's fast, even though the PC is older than my Mac! (Eclipse shows a factor of 4 on startup).
Hahahahah!
Haha. Ha.
My PowerBook was in for repairs twice for over four weeks. They replaced it with a new one the first time because they had lost it at the repair centre. At no point was I offered a loan unit, and they only finally sent me the replacement after I spent over ten hours on their (10p/minute) customer support line.
Oh, and they've now closed the mail-in repair centre in the UK, so you need to take your machine to an authorised third-party repair centre when it breaks. There is only one of these in Wales, so good luck if you live there.
Mind you, if you walk in to the AppleStore in London, you will still be told by the staff on the shop floor that they offer free mail-in repair (it's also in the AppleCare T&Cs). Apparently they didn't bother telling any of their resellers either.
Apple support is a joke. Their machines are fine for home use, but they are way behind even Dell for corporate use (no, we really can't spare a technician for half a day to drive a machine over to the repair centre every time one breaks, and then another half-day to collect it a month later when it's fixed).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Don't use the scientology thing to put slashdot down for censorship. When Scientology threatened to sue, they did delete the post, but they then posted a frontpage story about being forced to take the post down that was basically an extended critique of Scientology, complete with a huge list of links to sources about the abuses of scientology, xenu.net links, etc., including links to the very material that they had been forced to remove. The offending material, of course, was reposted in another comment (probably several times over) in the new discussion. The net effect was not censorship at all but a huge expose against scientology that was probably seen by half a million readers. The offending material was removed from a single comment on slashdot where it probably would have been ignored, but links to the same material along with a coherent explanation of many of the things wrong with the church of scientology was posted to the front page where it was read and discussed publicly by a much larger audience than would have ever been exposed to it. It was a victory for free speech, and it's unfair to criticize slashdot for censorship based on that example.
First nvidia chipset for intel had a bug, bit31 of usb memory BAR was not decoded properly so usb could only use memory below 2GB. Nvidia's reference bios would always re-map any physical memory above 2GB to be above 4GB. If apple is trying to use ram above 2GB in the address range of 2GB-4GB and they are using the buggy version of the nvidia southbridge then you can get random hw hangs as the usb controller trashes memory. This is just one of the many serious hardware bugs in this chipset.
I'm running a windows system with 3Gb of memory, and an Nvidia video card. The extra Gb comes in handy when working in Photoshop or Cinema 4D. However, it will cause just about any game you can mention to lock up. I have to have a switch in my boot.ini file so that at system boot up, I can choose a system configuration that works with games and just about everything else, but basically does not use that last gig of RAM at all, or I can choose a configuration that makes the last Gb available, but will not allow any game to function, at all. Cinema 4D, which does use OpenGL rather aggressively, does not seem to tip the graphics driver over in the same way that games do - it must manage memory differently.
W So soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimero soft Windows XP More Memory" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /3GB /usepmtimer
I realize this doesn't have much to do with the original poster's problem (he's on OS X) but it does seem more than coincidental that going past 2Gb of memory causes issues on both platforms, with the only common denominator being the presence of an Nvidia card and associated drivers.
Here is my boot.ini for anyone who has a similar set up and wonders what to do about the issues:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDO
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micr
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micr
planet texture maps and more
Actually, you're the one who is 'freaking nuts' as you like to say. The trusted platform module (tpm) that is an integral part of the intel architecture on both pc & mac.
The TPM is such an integral part of the Intel Architecture no both PC and Mac that it's not even included on the latest Mac hardware, such as the Core 2 Duo iMac, the Mac Pro, or any of the Core 2 Duo portables.