Odds & Ends: MediaAssets; Supra modems; Epson printers; more

MediaAssets and Quark bug/ A reader reports a problem with the "MDB Quark Xtension" (version 2.5b41) of MediaWay's MediaAssets package. The extension is used to save a MediaAsset resource into a QuarkXPress document. However, "when hitting Save from within Quark a watch cursor comes up and doesn't do anything eventually leading to Quark crashing. MediaWay denies knowledge of this issue but it is happening on all of our Macs running OS 8.1. We can disable the Xtension and the problem goes away but major directory damage is found afterward by Norton."

Optimizing solves startup problem Tony Lembke found that, after upgrading his iMac from Mac OS 8.1 to Mac OS 8.5, he could not get the Mac to startup from the internal hard drive. He writes: "A colleague told me that he had a similar problem and found that, to his surprise, the problem ceased when he ran Speed Disk (part of Norton Utilities) and optimized the disk - and, to my surprise, it worked for me too."

Modem upgrades praised Regarding the ITU V.90 Standard Upgrades for Diamond K56flex Modems: Ron Drake found that "the reliability of my modem increased dramatically" since he installed it (as well as the updated modem script).

Epson printer tip A reminder: Several readers note that, if you are having problems printing to Epson printers via a serial port, you should check if their are Epson USB extensions installed in your System Folder. If so, delete them. This often fixes the problem. On the other hand, if you are connecting the printer via USB, make sure you have these extensions installed.

Correction re downloading Microsoft updates via Netscape Previously, we noted that, if you were having problems downloading Microsoft updates from Netscape browsers, you should delete the spaces in the URL. Actually, you should replace the spaces in the URL with " ".