Odds & Ends: G4 video; Sonnet Tempo; Earthlink & Eudora

Power Mac G4: Video Driver Selected At System Startup Time TIL article #25250 notes: "The Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio) and Power Mac G4 Cube computers both have two different sets of video card driver software installed--NVIDIA and ATI. When the computer starts up, only the appropriate video driver software is loaded. If an NVIDIA video card is installed, the ATI video card driver software is not loaded, and an icon with a red X through it is displayed. This is normal."

Sonnet Tempo upgrade warning A reliable source informs that you should not use the recently released Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA66 3.12 firmware upgrade if you also have a Sonnet Crescendo/7200 upgrade installed. The firmware update may fail. [Of note, we now have two reports (from Jeff Miller and Brian Marsh) of this upgrade failing, with the card needing to be replaced. Jeff was using a Power Mac 7500; we do not know what Brian was using as yet.]

Update: Our source offers a correction and a clarification: "I apologize. The firmware updater not working has nothing to do with the G3 or G4 7200 upgrade. It's got to do with the machine itself. A non-upgraded 7200 can't use the updater either. Same applies to a 7250 or 8200. It's something about the architecture of those machines. If someone has whacked their Tempo card and they own a 7200, they'll need to move the card to another PCI class machine and run the updater again and it should restore the card (as long as it's not 3.12). They can get v3.08 of the firmware from support@sonnettech.com. It is extremely important to have nothing connected to the Tempo card when doing firmware updates."

Earthlink and Eudora conflict? Mack Willingham writes: "It seems that Earthlink has turned off support for the XTND XMIT feature of POP3. This feature is used by Eudora. As a result, one can still use Eudora to receive mail, but not to send mail, unless you are connected directly to Earthlink via DSL or dial-up. If you happen to be on an office LAN, like me, you are outta luck."

Update: Readers respond:

• Julian Koh replies: "The fix is simply to use the SMTP server of whatever network you're connected to at the time."
• Michael Davis concurs: "If Mr. Willingham's local network has its own SMTP server, he could use that system for his outgoing email."
• Michelle Steiner similarly adds: "This is currently being discussed on the comp.sys.mac.comm newsgroup. Essentially, Earthlink is requiring all SMTP connections to be from computers on their network (either DSL or dialup) to prevent their SMTP servers from being used for relaying. This means that people accessing their Earthlink accounts from work (as an example) have to use the SMTP servers where they work."
• As other readers noted, and we can confirm, what Earthlink did is an increasingly common technique, used by ISPs to prevent spammers from relaying email over their servers.

RealPlayer update David Atkinson ran the "Check for Update" feature of RealPlayer 8 Basic and was told that a new version was available. He proceeded to download a 4.9MB Installer. After installing the software, he noticed that the "core Real Player component now had a version of 6.0.9.584 (the older version is 6.0.9.450)."