Assorted Follow-ups

Copy freeze with ATA drives Regarding a previously reported freeze when copying on IDE drive: Matt Snider and Jeremy Tinley now report that Speed Doubler 8.0.1A corrects the problem. Also, "Apple has indicated that they were able to recreate the problem and this problem will be fixed in Mac OS 8.1."

Contextual menu plug-ins Regarding the previously reported note that Contextual Menu plug-ins need SOMObjects extension enabled in order to work: Kevin Muñoz points out that this extension is technically part of OpenDoc software. As such, disabling other OpenDoc extensions with Extensions Manager (or Conflict Catcher 4) could inadvertently result in the SOMObjects extension being disabled as well (as they might all be considered part of the same linked "package" of extensions). This could be why some people unexpectedly find their contextual menu plug-ins no longer working.

Flag icon Okay, so it's not exactly a new feature. As many, many readers have told me: the keyboard layout flag icon in the menu bar (as mentioned here last time) is hardly a new feature. It has been a default on international versions of the Mac OS perhaps as far back as System 6. Still, the Keyboard control panel for Mac OS 8 (U.S. version) has been redesigned to make this feature more accessible.

MacLabelPro Regarding our previous report, several readers report that versions of MacLabelPro other than 1.6.3 (including version 1.5 and 1.6.4) appear to work fine with Mac OS 8.

Global Village updates and Newer Ethernet card Regarding the problem of the Global Village Platinum PC card firmware update possibly trashing a Newer Ethernet PB10 card, a reader writes that he had a similar problem, except that he did not need to replace the Ethernet card. He "merely needed to reinstall the PB10 Ethernet software and everything returned to normal. This has occurred twice with two different GV software/firmware updates on a PB1400/133c."