Hi all,
I just installed OS 9 from the universal CD image found on the forum to my iMac G4 800 Mhz that I just got. Little background first-I am a student doing summer research at DePauw University in Indiana, and having some experience with older Macs, decided to use this desktop as a (relatively) distraction-free machine with which to read journal articles in PDF form and do some basic word processing. To those ends, I installed Acrobat 5.1 and Appleworks 6. I also went through and updated any software included with the disk image that wasn't at it's latest iteration. This included updating Quicktime 4 to 6. I downloaded a copy of Quicktime 6 from Macintosh Repository (url:https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2473-quicktime-6-0-3).
I've been using a 16 GB Sandisk USB flash drive to transfer files to the iMac from my MB Pro (just faster), and when I tried to unpack the Quicktime .smi file (directly from USB, as I had for most of the other programs), it froze the entire system. It was a total freeze, not even the mouse cursor would move. I have read that freezes on OS 9 are often caused by RAM issues, but in most of those cases the mouse would still move. In addition, it certainly seemed to be triggered by me opening the installer file. I did a forced shutdown, and tried opening the file again, and this time it did unpack and install. However, when I opened the Quicktime folder and tried to launch the Quicktime updater, I got a message saying that "Quicktime had not been installed correctly", making me suspicious. I then tried to open the sample movie, and the system did another total freeze. After forcing a shutdown a second time and rebooting, I was greeted with the Quicktime preference assistant (or whatever it's called) that asks questions after an install. I tried relaunching the Quicktime updater to see if I would get the same error, but this time it just complained about some server issue, which made more sense. The sample movie also opened fine.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation. My questions are:
1) Does anyone know why this would have happened?
2) Is this serious to the stability of the OS? Should I reinstall the OS, or is everything fine?
I know that OS 9 sometimes freezes (like any OS), but given it's reliance on extensions, I didn't want mess with any possible system fragility. Is this Quicktime thing really a problem?
Thank you for any help!
-Sam