Odds & Ends: Melissa FAQ; tips re MS Patch; Quicken R5; ATI; more

Melissa FAQ For an interesting FAQ on the Melissa virus, check out this CERT Coordination Center page. Also check out this CERT link. (Thanks, Susan Lesch, of Mac Virus, and E. Salsberg.)

MS Patch works (and a tip on using it) Chris Lawson confirms that Microsoft's The Microsoft Office 98 Unique Identifier Updater (mentioned here last time) patch does indeed work as advertised. However, to strip the GUID number from an existing document, you will need to do a Save As and give the file a new name. [Psst: If you are having trouble downloading this file in Netscape, try replacing the spaces in the URL with " ".]

Quicken R5 tip For those upgrading to Quicken R5, Stephen Siegel advises: "Use the reconstruct command [Option-Command-B] before entering anything into the files directly."

ATI Graphics Accelerator not loading: Changing load order helps Readers continue to report problems with (and solutions for) the ATI Graphics Accelerator extension not loading at startup. Putting the ATI Graphics Accelerator extension at end of the loading order fixed the problem for Don Webster. Putting a space in front of its name - to get it to load early - worked for Joseph Dien. Go figure. John Allen confirmed our previous report that having the ATI extension load before Norton Auto-Protect can eliminate this problem.

Creation Station tablet and ADB to USB problem Victoria Stevens writes that Calcomp's Creation Station drawing tablet, connected via Griffin Technology's iMate ADB to USB adapter, will not work with her iMac. She received confirmation of this from CalComp (now purchased by GTCO. There was no word as to when or if a fix would be available.

Three Macs & a Printer, a web site devoted to "the setup and maintenance of small-scale Macintosh networks," has a new URL.

Palm Pilot calculator bug If you have a Palm Pilot and you haven't upgraded it to a Palm III, beware of a minor bug in the old built-in calculator. David Pogue explains: "Try this, for example: 1.1-.1. The answer, of course should be 1. [Yet it displays 0.1.] Interestingly, if you now add 1 to that answer, you get the [correct] answer 2!"

Macworld article re MacFixIt is now online Previously, I mentioned that Macworld magazine cited MacFixIt as "Best Troubleshooting Site." At that time, the article was not yet online. Now it is. It's called the Web Traveler's Companion.