Odds & Ends: Studio Pro slide show error; drivers for GeForce 3; QuickDay crash?; PB G4 flicker; more
Odds & Ends: Studio Pro slide show error; drivers for GeForce 3; QuickDay crash?; PB G4 flicker; more
New drivers for GeForce 3 Taz Goldstein notes that the now shipping GeForce 3 card from Apple includes a copy of the Power Mac G4 Software Install CD. It contains what may be a newer version (3.6) of the NVIDIA drivers than what was on the CD that originally came with the G4. These new drivers should be installed. You can do this manually by grabbing them from the disk image located at Software Installers/System Software/Macintosh Computer Software/Macintosh Computer SW.img.
Update: A report on Accelerate Your Mac! states that these reports are erroneous, due to a misunderstanding as to where to look for the version number. "Version 2.1.1f1 is the latest actual drivers I've heard of and they do not solve the Lightwave 3D OpenGL problems with the MX or GF3 card, or the transparency issues in some games." Mike Breeden already has the card installed on his G4 and has posted a good deal more info about it, including performance tests.
QuickDay crash? Bill Timberman found that, when editing or adding an event via the QuickDay menu of the new Now Up-To-Date/Now Contact 4.0, the program crashed. The crash occurred even when running only the 'Mac OS 9.1 All' extension set plus QuickDay and QuickContact added." we have not had other reports of this as yet.
Update: Don Morris notes: "The prefs file format for QuickDay and QuickContact changed from 3.x to 4.0. Perhaps deleting the QuickDay Prefs file (with Extensions off) will resolve the problem."
However, Steven Fair had the same problem and found that trashing Prefs was not successful. Actually, it's a bit more complicated: "After 4 or 5 of these crashes, QuickDay apparently got munged, because now I get the menubar icon, but the only thing that shows up is "Open Now Up To Date." Even though I have the boxes check in the QuickDay cdev, those boxes refuse to show up in the menu. Nor will any of the hotkeys I defined invoke anything. I trashed the QuickDay preferences and have reinstalled the QuickDay cdev via Custom Install - all to no avail."
PowerBook G4 screen flicker Tim Rayner notes that Apple's Discussion Boards have several threads (such as this one, first started in late February) describing a "screen flickering" issue with at least some new PowerBook G4s. In worst cases, "after a few minutes to a few hours of operation, the screen will go entirely blank as if sleeping on low power." Closing the lid for a few minutes typically brings the Book back to life. It appears to be a hardware problem. PowerBook G3s also were known to have a similar problem (see previous MacFixIt report).
Sound Blaster card and CD-RW drive glitch? James Locker found that he could not get his FireWire CD-RW drive to show up as a mounted device (such as in Apple System Profiler and Toast) after installing a Sound Blaster Live! card. Removing the card restores the accessibility of the CD-RW drive. Trying to change the load order of the driver software did not resolve this. Update: Reinstalling the Sound Blaster software did the trick.
Extensis researching MenuFonts and PB G4 wake-from-sleep bug We previously reported a wake-from sleep problem with PowerBook G4s that was linked to MenuFonts. Alan Hirshberg asked Extensis about the current status of this bug. They replied: "We have not yet found a fix or a work-around, but are still researching the issue. We'll notify you when a solution is found."
Initio card disables deep sleep; no fix planned Steve Popkin recently purchased a G4 466 and an Initio Miles Bluenote card to handle my legacy SCSI peripherals. As has occurred with other SCSI cards (see this item for example), this card disables "deep sleep" low power mode. He asked Initio if they had plans to fix this. They replied: "The Deep Sleep issue is a feature of the new PCI 2.2 specifications. Our adapters were designed to the (then current) PCI 2.1 specifications which did not mention PCI Bus Power Down Mode. Our engineers have not been able to make our adapters support this feature in our firmware. The only way to fix this would be to redesign our chipset which at this time Initio has no plans to do."
Graph Link and Navigation Services conflict Tom Dart informs that Texas Instruments Graph Link software does is not fully compatible with Navigation Services. In particular: "When trying to save screen captures from the calculator, I get the following message 'The name of this object is not valid for use as a data or program type; please use another name.' Entering another name, returns the same response." He contacted TI about this and they told him to deselect the "Use Navigation Services" option from Graph Link's Preferences. This worked.