Odds & Ends: Clearing out the backlog...

With an ever increasing number of potential Late-Breakers items piling up at my doorstep, I thought I would use this Labor Day week-end to reduce the pile a bit. Here, in no particular order, is assortment of odds and ends:

Mac OS 8.0.1 to fix PowerBook 3400 "wake from sleep" crash? We have previously reported a problem where, if you have AppleTalk active and Ethernet selected from the AppleTalk control panel, the PowerBook 3400 will crash when it wakes from sleep - with a Finder Type 10 error. Reports are that this bug will be fixed in Mac OS 8.0.1.

Word macro viruses A web page from Penn State gives some useful background on Word macro viruses.

Update: Susan Lesch notes: "The Penn state Web page looks like it is based on outdated information. Microsoft's tool was written when only a few macro viruses existed. They stopped development on it long ago. It is easily bypassed and can crash when processing large batches of files." I agree. I decided to post the link anyway because it looked like it gave some useful background on exactly what these viruses are and what they do. To really eradicate them, a true anti-virus utility (such as SAM or Virex) is recommended.

Installing converter for Word 97 Two readers (Fred Krughoff and Steve Lombardi) have noted the new Microsoft Word converter for Window's Word 97 files will not work unless Word is on your startup partition (if it isn't, you will get an odd message saying that "files are already installed"). To get around this, Fred created a new folder on his startup partition called "Microsoft Word." He placed a copy of the "Word Extensions" folder (from your real Word folder) into this new folder. Now the Installer ran successfully. Steve found that he only needed to create an empty folder called "Word Extensions" to get things to work. In either case, when finished, simply drag the installed files to the desired location.

WebSTAR crash explained Wade Maxfield asked StarNine why "WebSTAR consistently crashes when I try to access the remote admin feature through my browser." He received the following reply: "The 2.1 SSI plug-in (which the remote admin plug-in requires) has a bug which makes it fail to work with 68K machines (it crashes). We haven't heard of any instance of this happening with a Power Mac however. A fix is in the works. What you want to do, for now, is to run the 2.1 application with the 2.0.2 admin plug-in and the 2.0.3 SSI plug-in (earlier versions of those plug-ins are not recommended). They should be available from our web page." [Actually, they are not yet on the web page, although StarNine will reportedly mail them to you.]

Another Mac OS 8 minor glitch If you double-click a document icon to open it, when you return to the Finder, that icon is no longer selected. In Mac OS 7, the selection remained.

Running Norton Disk Doctor 3.5.1 without the new CD Mark Campanelli notes that if you downloaded Norton Disk Doctor 3.5.1 instead of shelling out for the CD, you can still run 3.5.1 while starting up from a CD - without having to run a copy of NDD from your hard drive - even on PowerBooks that do not allow a floppy disk drive and CD-ROM drive to be installed at the same time. Simply, copy NDD to a RAM Disk and then restart from the CD. This may not work if your startup partition is really fouled up (as this could affect the RAM Disk itself), but should otherwise work fine.

Motorola BitSURFR modem updater problems Motorola has posted a flash ROM Updater which takes the firmware for the US External BitSURFR Pro modem to Rev. L. However, it appears to have some problems. In particular, both Keith Bumgarner (as sent to me by Eric Belsley of the MRP) and Jim Sweeney report that you may get connection problems or "DNS Entry Not Found" errors. Keith claims this is related to whether or not your ISP supports "pass-through PPP;" Jim says it is simply a problem with Apple's modem connect script for the BitSURFR. Motorola told him to expect new scripts soon. In any case, downgrading back to version 1K (or 3K) is a work-around.

Termination on 9600s I could not confirm this, but John Schlauch claims that Apple tech support told him that Power Mac 9600's may need an external terminator on the SCSI chain - even in those cases where other models do well without one.

PPC 750 daughterboards Eric Belsley had a fine detailed preview/review of Newer Technology's MAXpowr Pro CPU daughtercard last week on the MRP.

Hardware upgrades and Mac OS 8 Several reports indicate that L2 caches and upgraded daughterboard processors in early PCI Power Macs (especially the 7500) that worked fine in Mac OS 7.x may lead to startup system crashes after upgrading to Mac OS 8.

Visioneer and CC4 conflict? George Oster writes that tech support at Visioneer told him that the Visioneer extensions will not work with Conflict Catcher 4, and recommended reinstalling the Apple Extension Manager. However, they seem to work fine for me with my PaperPort Strobe.

Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit is now up to version 7.74.

Dialog View 2.3 and 2.3J have been released. This update fixes minor compatibility problems with Mac OS 8 and Internet Explorer.

Looking for hard to find Mac products? Try MacTreasures.

IE Mail and News glitch work-around Anthony Paradowski claims that the previously reported problem of cascading windows opening - when accessing Mail & News from the buttons in Internet Explorer - can be eliminated by disabling AppleScript.

Don't use Hotline Doubler Xavier Bury writes that files named "Hotline Doubler" or "Better Hotline Bandwidth" are Trojan Horses of sorts. They are really AppleScript files that can be used to allow others to gain access to your email address, IP address and similar information - if these files are in use while you are connected online.