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Odds & Ends: iMac CD drives; NUpowr G3; more

Odds & Ends: iMac CD drives; NUpowr G3; more

CNET staff
3 min read
Forums Today: iMac CD-ROM drive quality A thread in the MacFixIt Forums suggests that 333MHz iMacs may have a quality-control problem with the CD-ROM drive.

NUpowr G3 upgrade for PB 1400 and problem mounting PC floppy disks Regarding the problem with mounting PC floppy disks in a PowerBook 1400 with a NUpowr G3 upgrade running Mac OS 8.6: The initial report was with a Japanese system. Since then, several readers reported the same problem with U.S. software. (Thanks, Mike Settlage, Charles Hirschman and Paul Jones).

Update: Ruben Ferreira additionally notes that "PC-formatted floppies are not recognizable on PCs after they have been inserted into my PB 1400 with a NUpowr G3 card. This only occurs now that I upgraded from 8.5 to 8.6."

Lombard TrackPad issue? Other web sites continue to report avariety of hardware glitches with Apple's "Lombard" PowerBook G3 Series. The latest one is a problem with the sensitivity of the TrackPad button, mentioned both on MacInTouch and The PowerBook Source the other day. For whatever it may mean, aside from the previously reported USB problems, we have gotten very few reports of PowerBook G3 problems here at MacFixIt.

QuickTime and TIFFs Apple TIL article #24944 explains thatvarious versions of QuickTime will display at least some TIFF files, depending on the type of compression fomat used to create the TIFF. Supported TIFF codecs include: None, PackBits, LZW, and CCITT 1D. Unsupported TIFF codecs include: Group 3 Fax and Group 4 Fax.

Quicken and Epson conflict? A reader claims there is an extension conflict between Quicken 98 Deluxe and the Epson Stylus Color 850 software v5.54 (at least on his Power Mac 7100 running Mac OS 8.1): "Specifically, if you try to create a Credit Card account with Epson extensions turned on, you get a Type 2 error. You can create Bank accounts etc., but not Credit Card accounts. The conflict was confirmed by Intuit tech support."

UMAX control strip glitch? Phil Zampino writes: "The UMAX VSControlStrip control strip module for my UMAX 2100U USB scanner was stealing cycles from my 9600 (upgraded to a G3/300) - making it very difficult to type. I don't know if it's significant that my scanner was unconnected to the machine at the time, but when I finally figured out that this was the culprit everything returned to normal."

Update: Cliff Chu writes that updating to the VistaScan 3.5.1 software fixed this problem for him. However, Fred Krebs had the problem even with this latest version. More generally, several readers have noted that UMAX's MagicScan software works for many of the scanners that "officially" use VistaScan. If MagicScan does work, readers report that it is a better interface and has less problems overall. Try it.

Update: Roland Gustafsson explains: "I believe the VS CS is merely trying to establish a connection with the scanner and is doing a SCSI-search operation and that is the cause for the delay. If you switch on the scanner for a few seconds, the delay goes away since the VS module finds the scanner and tells it whatever it needs to tell it."

GoLive and ftp A reader found that, with Adobe GoLive 4.0 and Mac OS 8.6, when trying to connect to an ftp server, they got an error that said: "MACB D command not understood." Adobe tech support is investigating.

PGP bug? Corey McCoy believes there is a bug in PGP Freeware 6.0.2 when running Mac OS 8.6 and only on G3/BW Macs. He writes: "After installing PGP Freeware, SimpleText started giving me 'SimpleText cannot display this document because there is not enough memory' errors with most documents. Conflict Catcher identified the PGPmenu extension as the culprit." Increasing SimpleText's memory helped in some, but not all, cases.

Update: Daniel Dobkin writes: "This one has had me scratching my head for a week or two. Sure enough, though, it's PGP; more specifically, turning the PGP Menu preference on for SimpleText, under Mac OS 8.6, results in failure. Changing the preferences (by removing SimpleText from the list of apps) solves the problem."

The FreeHand Source web site has a new URL. "This site is totally dedicated in bringing FreeHand users up-to-the-minute news, tips, troubleshooting and spotlighted features with Macromedia's FreeHand and FreeHand Xtras for both Mac and Windows users."

CodeWarrior Professional Release 5 has started shipping. (Thanks, Gregory Pratt.)