Norton CD; G4 red light; Shutdown Items not shut down; more

New Norton CD coming Symantec informs us that the current Norton Utilities CD cannot be used as a startup disk with the new Macs introduced at Macworld Expo Tokyo. They add: "We will have a CD that boots the new Mac models in the near future." TIL article explains G4 red light TIL article #60684 notes that there is a red light on the logic board of Power Mac G4s. You can often see it lit up through the case. Apple explains: "The light indicates that the computer is on (including sleep mode), and serves as a warning that upgrades, such as installing cards or SDRAM memory, should not be performed until the system is shut down." (Thanks, MacCentral.) Shutdown Items not shut down Apple TIL article #17521 states that disabling extensions at startup should prevent items in the Shutdown Items folder from running at Shut Down. This is because: "The Finder Scripting extension activates the System 7.5 Shutdown Items folder. Both Shift down and the Extensions Manager will deactivate Finder Scripting extension." However, the Finder Scripting Extension is no longer a separate file in recent OS versions (at least not in Mac OS 8.6 or Mac OS 9). As a result, Shut Down items now run at Shut Down even if you started up with Extensions Off. VST quality control issue? Jim Corrigan bought 4 VST 22GB FireWire hard drives. All of them had an unusual chirping (or, in one case, grinding) sound that VST confirmed meant that the drives were "broken." EarthLink too optimistic? Several readers (including Matt Bernhardt) have commented that the EarthLink modem script called "EarthLink Network Script" always reports 57600bps access even when it is not the case. It seems the script is not actually reporting the modem's bps, but more likely the speed between the modem and the Mac. MRJ and VolcanoChat conflict? Immediately after installing Apple's Macintosh Runtime for Java 2.2, Dave Peterson's Mac started freezing when using VolcanoChat software within Explorer. It did not happen when running the same applet within Navigator (because it does not use MRJ). Orange Micro SCSI cards MacInTouch has been covering reader reports of problems with Orange Micro SCSI cards.