Odds & Ends

Speed Disk vs. DiskWarrior issue: one more comment Last week, we had a trio of items on Alsoft's vs. Symantec's differing views regarding DiskWarrior reporting errors due to Speed Disk leaving extent data after defragmenting a disk. The most recent issue of the Macintosh Weekly Journal offered its opinion about this matter. MWJ suggests that both Alsoft and Symantec are right (or are both wrong, depending on your view). "Alsoft is right in that leaving old extent data in an optimized disk's extents overflow file is useless even to disk repair programs, as far as we can tell, and in that the Mac OS zeroes unused file extent information in lots of cases. Symantec is right, however, in that failure to zero the information is not an error."

Y2K bug with StringToDate: a follow-up The Macintosh Weekly Journal, together with several MacFixIt readers (including Kevin Connery), took exception to the severity of the Y2K threat (as described here last time). Essentially, while there is agreement that a problem can exist for applications that use the StringToDate function when dates are stored as 2 digits, it is also agreed that Apple has long encouraged storing dates in 4 digit format - and has also improved the Mac OS date routines to adequately handle most of the likely 2 digit year problems. As a result, only very few programs should be affected by this Y2K issue.

Extensis takes over Suitcase From a press release: "Effective March 1, 1999, Extensis will assume sole responsibility for development, marketing, sales, and distribution of Suitcase."

A fix for Sound Manager memory error A new Apple TIL article (#30898) notes that, if you get an "Not enough Memory is available while using Sound Manager" error, the cause is usually a damaged Sound Preferences file. The solution is to restart with extensions off and delete the file. Then restart normally.

Iomega Buz and new G3/BW conflict? Robert Schaap writes that Iomega tech support has confirmed that the Iomega Buz is not compatible with the G3/BW Macs.

Scrollability and ATI extensions conflict? A reader kept getting an X through the ATI Graphics Accelerator extension icon at startup (indicating that it did not load) on his G3/BW 400MHz machine. If he disabled the Scrollability extension, the ATI extension loaded fine. [I am not certain if this occurs with the latest update to Scrollability or not.]

Mixing wide and narrow SCSI If you are having trouble mixing wide and narrow SCSI devices on the same Mac, Adaptec has a web page with some advice. (Thanks, Garth Magee.)