Odds & Ends: Toast 5; Third-party monitors; AppleWorks freeze bug; Speeding up System Prefs "launch"

Toast 5 not quite ready for Mac OS X? Wil Voss writes: "The box for Roxio's Toast 5 (Titanium) says that Toast 5 is Carbonized and totally made for OS X. Unfortunately, on the side of the box, there is a very tiny addendum stating that a patch for OS X will be released shortly after the OS X final ships. Roxio has this to say regarding the patch: 'The Toast 5.01 patch is due to be released at the end of April. This version of Toast will support OSX.'"

Third-party monitors and OS X A reader has a Power Mac G4 with a 17' Sony Trinitron Multiscan 200sx monitor. The monitor is about four years old. He writes: "In OS 9, I usually run it at 1024x768 although it is capable of resolutions of 1280x1024. When I started up in OS X, the monitor defaulted back to what it says is 640x480 (looks like 640x400 to me). When I go into the Monitor system preferences, all it says for resolution is 640x480." we have occasionally had reports of other similar problems with OS X and third-part monitors.

AppleWorks 6.1 freeze bug Bob Gilbert writes: "Launch AppleWorks 6.1 Preview 2 and open a word processing document. From the Format menu, select Paragraph. You will be unable to close the dialog box and will need to Force Quit AppleWorks to regain control of the Mac." We tried it and confirmed the bug.

Update: R.A. Girton replies: "If you just edit one of the fields in the window and hit the return key, you can get a response from the window and it will close. No force quit is needed."

Tip: Speeding up System Preferences window opening Given how often we use System Preferences, we found it annoying how long we had to wait for it to open each time we needed it. We could have selected to minimize its window, rather than quit, to work around this. But we found a solution we liked better: Simply close the window entirely! System Preferences remains open, even with no window visible (operations in progress may even continue with the window closed). Now, when you click the System Preferences icon in the Dock, the window appears instantly!