I spent the good part of this morning trying to get the networked drive I bought awhile back to work with my new Macbook. The thing worked just fine with my brother’s eMac running Tiger (drive wouldn’t show up in Network area, but changing him to the correct workgroup solved that problem entirely) and got it working with a Windows XP computer.

Read the article I wrote concerning all the drive setup and network config stuff for WinXP and Tiger here.

The problem comes into play here though. I had enabled “Windows Sharing” on my user account in my journey to get this drive working. I was using my computer and then I started getting error messages saying “error code -10810″. Basically, after googling around for about another hour, I had so many processes running, that the system wouldn’t let me start anymore. So, after restarting several times and trying to be quick enough to open up the Activity Monitor, I found the culprit. (Also note that my Macbook was running at full steam ahead, see pic below)

Turns out I had several, and I do mean several, instances of “smbd” running. While it wasn’t using any of the processor and only 300kb of memory of each instance, it had hanged my laptop. Solution was to be quick enough to fire up System Preferences and turn of Windows Sharing. Problem fixed.

From my reading, it can be anything, not just samba. So, if you’re getting the same problem, fire up Activity Monitor (or the terminal if you’re so inclined) and see what process is there several (and we’re talking a few hundred) times. That’s your bad guy.