Macking 33

Okay, Okay
I got 4 emails the day my warning against OS8.1 appeared in print, and they all contradicted my opposition to it. An example, from wyatt@imagina.com: "I don't agree with your comments on Mac OS 8.1. I have installed OS 8.1 on four machines: two 6200/75s, one 5500/225 and one G3 266/DT. All the machines run faster and much more stable than with OS 8. The 6200s (both with 64 MB of RAM) are crash proof now. In fact my work 6200, that I spend 12 hours a day on, has had only one crash in the last 9 days (opening Netscape 4.04 while Claris eMailer was unpacking a 2 MB file). Before 8.1 I suffered a crash a day.
"Performance - I play Myth... on a 6200 some nights. With 8.0 it was tolerable. Barely. 8.1 greatly improved the speed of the game and the rendering - it's that new MathLib from Motorola.- Photoshop 4.0 filters are faster... as is opening Photoshop and Pagemaker.
"I also reformated three startup drives with the HFS+ format. It was really nice getting back 147 MB on a 1 GB EIDE drive. The drives are running great... but I keep my Disk First Aid floppy handy in case.
"Sure I could do without 8.1...but life is better with it!
So I responded with my primary concern:
But the magic question is, does Disk First Aid do enough to completely replace Norton, at least until it is updated to deal with HFS+?
and got this reply:
"You know... that as soon as I answer that...I'll have problems.
"So far... Yes. I have had no problems. The only odd thing is that a couple of aliases from an external drive lost their custom icon...and the Chooser icon defaults back to a generic icon.
"Then I boot from floppy and run Disk First Aid...and the icons get fixed.
"I really like 8.1 and the HFS+ format.
"I can't wait until this summer...Rhapsody and OS 8.2 (8.5 or whatever it's going to be) lot of fun for my Macs!"
--Wyatt
Then today, Feb. 27, a new 8.1 user warned me that an extension can cause problems printing: the LocalTalk PCI extension. This can be especially troublesome if you have queued documents in the Print Monitor folder left from 8.0 and they start trying to print right away. He said to take that extension and manually move it into the Extensions (disabled) folder before you restart or even turn your printer on. Then restart, turn on your printer, and go to the Chooser to reselect it. This assumes a LocalTalk printer of some kind, not a serial inkjet.
So, as I start writing this on the 27th, I plan to back up my System Folder, then do a direct upgrade, right over my 8.0 folder and see what happens.
But first, I will visit the MacFixIt OS8.1 page.

It's installed!
Sunday, 8pm. It took hours to finish the transition to HFS+, although the upgrade from 8.0 itself was very easy.
I did it the way most people upgrading from 8.0 will do: insert the CD, double-click on the Upgrade icon and let fly.
I have to hand it to Apple's scriptwriters: they got it right this time. The install script did a good evaluation of my system, located the disabled extensions and panels, and updated everything that needed updating.
The first restart failed as my desktop pictures were loading. The machine froze without finishing my Startup Items. But the next restart went fine and has ever since.
Windows open a little faster. One of the peeves of 8.0 vs. 7.X was the Finder windows, which took longer to display their contents than I was used to. Now it may not be as quick as 7 was -- it's not intolerably slow no matter what -- but this most noticable effect is visibly faster. Of course the G3 won't run any version of 7, although Ken's experiments with Finder 7.6 say it will run that when the rest of the system is 8.1. Your mileage may vary, of course. Not yet fixed is the column order in the Finder windows. A couple of shareware authors have tried to patch the Finder so you could arrange the column order but have not succeeded so the products have not been released. Apple has tried to as well (thousands of people have complained), but the feature did not make it into the upgrade so it must be quite difficult.
The biggest time taker was doing the tape restore. My first-generation DAT drive strolls at a leisurely 7.4 megabytes per minute (including verification), so the final restore took a couple of hours.
After finishing a final backup session, I also copied all the files from the IDE drive to the internal SCSI drive, because I have never had to do a full restore from tape before and I wanted to be protected in case there was a tape failure. It took about a half-hour to copy all 14,000+ files across.
I have been using Retrospect with that old tape drive for all my backups, and have restored individual files before, but now I know: Retrospect works, and the hard drive looks just like before. Only problem: most of my aliases died in the restore. This is normal, as those of you who have done HD restores already know. It's just a nuisance; you have to use Find File a lot to open folders and recreate aliases.
The reward was a lot of free space on my drive. Where before I had 1.7 gigs available (4 gig drive), I now have 2.5! All those tiny files that take only a few hundred bytes each that required sectors of 33,000 bytes can now cram down into 4,000 byte sectors. That's still a lot of air, but it is a dramatic improvement.
But now, my hard drive volume will be invisible if I attempt to boot from an 8.0 CD or other startup disk, including the one that came with the G3. HFS+ volumes cannot be viewed under 8.0. The conversion to HFS+ is simplicity itself: Choose Erase Disk from the Special menu and choose Macintosh Extended Format from the popup menu. It takes only a few seconds, which was also a surprise. I was sure it would have to reformat and re-sector the drive, a procedure that takes around 45 minutes with 3rd party utilities like FWB Toolkit and Anibus 4.1.
After the upgrade to 8.1 (but before HFS+) I also discovered that a couple of my favorite extensions had stopped working: SmartScroll 3.0 and Snitch 2.5. On the net I found an upgrade for Snitch because since I had registered it, the publisher had emailed me to mention that they had released an 8.1-compatible upgrade. I found the SmartScroll upgrade the next day. I may have lost a few others, but I have not opened them all yet. Everything else seems to work fine!
So now, as promised in my warning last month, I can say Go Ahead, 8.0 users, and upgrade to 8.1. As long as you don't reinitialize your drive to use the "MacOS Extended Format," Norton Utilities will protect you from the normal corruption that every disk's file structure undergoes over time.
But you 7.5.x or 7.6 users, you have more work to do. You need to check the version numbers of every non-Apple system extension and control panel you have, and find out if they are current and compatible with 8.1 or not. Since most people don't keep up with this, but install a favorite utility and leave it alone as the months go by, there is a lot of old software out there.
Fear not, but realize that you have work to do. Time marches on (apparently at a dead run) and software gets updated. Apple has succeeded with this update, at least in the experience of the people who have written to me, and the few hours I have been using it myself.

Newton is History, Maybe
By now you have heard about the layoffs and shutdown of the Newton division at Apple. Was Jobs at it again, paring meat in hopes that a skeleton with robot linkage would be enough to keep the company profitable? Well, Jobs just invites cynicism, but he sure delivered on the G3 and there is probably more going on than we outside pundits can find out.
(One friend believes that Jobs dumped Newton because he just wanted to clear out every last vestige of Scully's regime, and users be damned. With Jobs' history, that idea is not unreasonable.)
WalletWare, a developer of NewtonOS products, put up a page discussing the possible future of hand-helds and their position is that not all is gloom and doom. In fact, they are downright optimistic about the potential of Apple porting a version of "Rhapsody Lite" or a version of the MacOS that would run on Newtons.
Newton sales are moribund because many people are abandoning their MessagePads for the PalmPilot, including me. The power of that little slab of silicon and plastic is just too much to ignore because the portability means that I can now carry it in my butt-pack, not my backpack. Since just all about I ever used my Newton for was the address-book database, a lot of potential was going unused. Sure, I wrote a couple of columns on it, but the idea of using it as a portable word processor so I could write in coffee houses, mountaintops and the like turned out to be a non-happening.
Besides, I just love tiny widgets. I got my first cell phone last month, because the Motorola StarTac became affordable. The damn thing is no larger than your average pager!
Newton activists should search out their favorite Newton-specific web pages for news and updates. At deadline time there was to be a massive demonstration and online mail-bombing of Apple in protest of the cancellation of the product. Existing developers plan to continue to produce products for the units out there now, and who knows: there may be a future for the old beast after all. Oh, and keep your keyboard. It works in the PalmPilot!

Correction
The page at MacResQ for fixing or replacing PowerBook screens should have ended in .shtml instead of .html, so you probably got a 404 when you tried hitting that link.
A brief lesson in hacking Web addresses is in order for those of you who did not figure out how to find out the page from the incorrect address.
Everything after a .com/ is a pointer to where on the server the page in question lies. If you start deleting backwards, you can often find the missing page by scanning folders. Take the above site, which is in its entirety, http://www.macresq.com/PortableProducts/lcd.shtml. A text document containing HTML code (the "s" stands for "secret" HTML, which only the coolest webmasters know and use) (insert smiley here) is sitting in a folder called PortableProducts, which is on the server maintained by MacResQ. The actual site could have another name entirely, but they have the Domain Name of macresq.com, which can simply be an alias. This is how my own site, www.moonmac.com, is actually located at Imagina.com under the address http://www.imagina.com/mklprc/index.html. If you go to that address you will still get a 404, however, because Imagina is redesigning their site and the old direct address has changed. The alias is the only way to get there, which is fine, because that is all I ever hand out.
So if an address returns an error, start by removing the name of the .html file. If that fails, lop off the last folder (subdirectory) name. Eventually you will wind up at the simplest address and should be able to land on a real web page and be able to go searching from there.

Cheapest Web retailers
Thanks to the latest Macworld, I got my new PalmPilot for only $297 instead of the $349 that the more well-known catalogs were asking. ComputerESP tracks the online databases for all kinds of Net retailers and returns a list of mail-order outfits' prices for your desired item, sorted by price. You then click over to the retailer's page and order from there. Visit the page and do a search on your next hardware or software purchase. Oh, I got the PalmPilot from buycomp.com which claims the lowest prices on the planet. Never heard of them before.

Compact Mac on the Web
Here is an update to an old URL from Macking 20. http://www.eden.com/~arena/jagshouse/GetYourCompactMacOnTheWeb.html (yes, that is a wordy document title!) will tell you how to get a B&W Compact Mac (Plus, SE, Classic, Portable or PowerBook 100/145, etc.) on the Web. It tells you what browser to use and how to configure it. Essential info for people with an old Mac displacing air in a closet somewhere. Give it to the kids and don't worry if they surf the porn sites, because it can't display any images!
Anyway, this site gives you lots of addresses to get shareware programs that will enable you to move around the Internet at will, even on a 1-meg Plus!

Older Shared Library Manager
This tip from Tipworld: Apparently, ObjectSupportLib isn't the only troublesome extension that can (and shouldn't) be installed under 8.1. Microsoft Office places an older version of the Shared Library Manager in the Extensions folder, replacing the newer version installed with 8.1. This can cause system crashes at startup. To fix the problem, you must restart with the Shift key held down to disable extensions, remove the older copy of the Shared Library Manager file, and replace it with the new version of this file.
For this reason, if you have OS 8.1 and intend to install Microsoft Office, make a copy of your current Shared Library Manager file and tuck it away in a safe place.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)