Odds and Ends: Users receiving Mac OS X settlement claim forms; AppleWorks stalling/slowdowns; more

Users receiving Mac OS X settlement claim forms Users who participated in the class-action litigation against Apple regarding Mac OS X's ability to run on some G3 systems are beginning to receive claim forms.

MacFixIt reader Ben Rosenthal writes "Figured you'd like to know that I received the final OS X Settlement Claim form this past weekend. Requested details include version of OS X disputed, model of Covered Product, and date of purchase of each. Postmark deadline is July 31. No word on how long until I receive my $25 coupon."

AppleWorks stalling/slowdowns A MacFixIt reader reports a longstanding slow-down issue in AppleWorks, along with a fix:

"Firstly, a problem with AppleWorks that is caused by an apparent bug that was first reported four years ago in version 6.0.4 ? it?s still present in the latest version (6.2.9). I became aware of this problem when a client called up to say that he had a problem where typing in AppleWorks was extremely slow ? you could rattle away on the keyboard and the text would all eventually appear, but only at the rate of about one character every few seconds.

"I tracked the fix down to a report dated in October 2000 ? apparently it?s caused by the Recent Items feature (in General preferences ? Files). What happens is that the aliases that are used to implement this feature (which are located in ~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items) don?t get flushed properly. You may have this feature set to only show the last 10 items (the default), but the aliases older than the last 10 don?t get deleted. Presumably due to a bug of some type this causes the program to slow to a crawl.

"The fix is to switch off the feature ? you can also delete the contents of the Recent Items folder, but I haven?t checked to see what happens when the recent items gets back up to 10 again."

Starband complaints, alternative services While we continue to receive complaints about Starband's satellite Internet service when used with Macs, several readers have recommended alternative providers:

Dale Graham writes "Try Direcway's new 'two-way' modem service (DW600 modem). This is great, the programming is thru the modem, so it is platform agnostic. The guys who set up my system had never set up a Mac system before and were pretty nervous. I plugged in the ethernet cable and was online in about 5 seconds. Been using it about 4 months, and only problem has been an occasional outage at the satellite (2 of them). Costs $60 a month.. Outright installation is NOT cheap ($600), but if you sign up for 15 months at $100, the installation charge is amortized, and after that drops to $60 a month."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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