Odds & Ends: Hard drive speeds; NetscapePlus Alpha; more

EIDE vs. UltraWide SCSI performance A note from Charles McConathy (President, ProMax Systems, Inc.) on the G4List states: "From our tests we find that EIDE drives in most cases perform with applications such as Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut Pro just as fast as UltraWide SCSI...Most applications will not benefit from more than 15 MB/sec from the faster drives. The one application that will benefit is data servers...small records that burst and the drive can move on more requests. That is why we tested EIDE drives against U2 Wide SCSI with 100 MB Photoshop files...the faster SCSI made little if any difference in a bunch of tests. Some audio applications that deal with lots of tracks will benefit."

RAM prices on the rise Another note from Charles (again on the G4List) offers this warning: "The price of RAM has been increasing daily of late. With the massive earthquake in Taiwan, we expect prices to continue at a steep rise. We are paying more than $100 more per stick of 128 MB RAM than we did a week ago. We are told its going up again today. If you can find RAM at old prices grab it if you need it."

NetscapePlusAlpha and "mailto" After posting AppleScripts for dealing with this (see previous item), Richard Radke informs us of a shareware program called NetscapePlusAlpha. It "lets you use third party software directly from Netscape Navigator or Communicator. When you click links(such as mailto:, ftp://, news:), each program starts up automatically."

Outlook and ATM conflict There's a conflict between Outlook for Mac and ATM that can cause crashes, apparently caused by a font manager installed by Outlook. MacWindows.com has a discussion of the problem that includes several suggestions for workarounds.

How do you know if your driver is corrupt? Alsoft's Ask Al explains: "Drivers have a checksum that indicates whether they are intact. All Macs introduced since 1989 look for a valid checksum. Prior to that it was difficult to tell if a driver was corrupt unless it crashed. Drivers with invalid checksums are assumed to be corrupt and are not loaded. So the answer to the question is that if your Mac is less than 10 years old and the driver loads then it is not corrupt."

Canon and ColorSync glitch? Steve Chambers claims "Cannon BJC-4550 is incompatible with ColorSync 2.6 and Cannon has no plans to fix the driver." [We have not confirmed this. However we have reported on other ColorSync conflicts (see a, b, and c).]

Update: Two readers inform us that they do not have this conflict. Their Canon printer worked "okay" with ColorSync 2.6. Dale Anderson stated: "I won't say it works perfectly, the colors aren't very accurate, but I do get better color accuracy when I use ColorSync than when I use the Canon color calibration."

NAV 6 glitch? Adam Gervin writes: "I've noticed that if I enable 'treat CDs and DVDs as floppies' in Norton AntiVirus 6.0 on my bronze G3/400, the Finder quits at the point the CD scan begins. Disabling this option prevents this behavior."

Multiple Scan 15 repair policy: updates added We added several updates to yesterday's item on "Apple's policy on Apple Multiple Scan 15 repairs."