1. Introduction
2. The Macintosh family
2.1. The Macs
2.2. Floppy disk drives
3. The MacOS
3.1. Under the surface
3.2. The Macintosh Interface
4. Software
4.1. Word Processing
4.2. CAD
4.3. Utilities
4.4. Education
4.5. Internet
5. Printing
5.1. Printer hardware
5.2. Sharing printers
6. Networking
6.1. Ethernet
7. Troubleshooting and repairs
7.1. Before you reach for a screwdriver
7.2. Hardware repairs and troubleshooting
7.2.1. Desktop Macs
7.2.2. PowerBooks
7.2.3. Mice
7.2.4. Modems
8. Life in a PC world
9. Non-Mac friends for your Mac
10. Macintosh resources
10.1. Books
10.2. Periodicals
1. Introduction

WELCOME TO THE UK.COMP.SYS.MAC FAQ

The purpose of this document is to pool the knowledge of the members of
the newsgoup uk.comp.sys.mac, and to set it forth in a convenient
format.

New articles, corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcomed
and should be sent to mac@ukonline.co.uk.

All facts claimed in this document are open to scrutiny. All opinions
expressed are open to challenge. Contrary views are positively invited
for inclusion. Please address any points you feel need addressing.

UK.COMP.SYS.MAC

uk.comp.sys.mac is an Internet newsgroup ('uk' denotes the United
Kingdom; 'comp' denotes computers; 'sys' denotes systems; 'mac' denotes
the Apple Macintosh). A newsgroup is a public discussion forum. There
are many thousands of newsgroups world-wide: some are international,
some national, some local and some internal to a particular
organisation. Whatever the subject, there is almost certainly a
newsgroup dedicated to it. This is not the place for a tutorial on the
subject of Internet newsgroups; however if you want to explore them you
will need two things: firstly, access to a news server (ask your
Internet Service Provider about this) and a newsreader program (see the
section below on newsreaders for more information).

There are strict rules governing conduct on Internet newsgroups. Many
newsgroups also have a particular set of rules enshrined in the
newsgroup's Charter, drawn up at its inception. This is the Charter of
uk.comp.sys.mac:

"uk.comp.sys.mac is for the discussion of issues relating to Apple's
Macintosh computers (Macs) in the UK.

Advertising is unwelcome, although a company reference in a signature
not exceeding four lines is acceptable.

Individual offers of and direct requests to buy Mac equipment and
software are unwelcome in uk.comp.sys.mac and should be placed in a
newsgroup set up for this purpose, such as uk.adverts.computer.

Announcements that are of direct and specific relevance to UK Mac users
are welcome provided that they are specific to the UK but not specific
to one ISP; and are likely to be helpful to other UK Mac users. Routine
commercial announcements are unwelcome.

With the exception of PGP signatures, the posting of binaries or other
encoded data files is not permitted. All postings must be in plain text;
HTML and other forms of formatting markup are not permitted. Pointers to
relevant external information sources (Web or FTP urls, for example) are
welcome.

Posters to uk.comp.sys.mac are encouraged to follow established
netiquette (such as placing trimmed quotes before fresh text and using
signatures of 4 lines or less) as described in the various regular
postings to news.announce.newusers.

Cross-posting to or from the comp.sys.mac hierarchy is unwelcome, unless
directing a post to or from uk.comp.sys.mac and the comp.sys.mac
hierarchy with follow-ups set accordingly.

Moderate cross-posting with good reason between uk.comp.sys.mac and
other UK and Mac specific newsgroups is acceptable. `Moderate' should be
taken to mean `not more than one or two other newsgroups'.

The group will not be moderated."

All that may sound off-putting, but what it actually means is: respect
the demands of the Charter when you post to the group, and you will find
that you will be welcomed into a community of a large number of
amazingly well-informed and helpful individuals who will take the time
to respond and assist you if they can. It also means that if you don't
you will at best be completely ignored.

Most but not all readers of uk.comp.sys.mac are based in the UK. Its
small size compared to most of the groups in the worldwide
comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy means that it is far more useful than many of
them are - it is largely free of spam, advertsisng and nuisance posters.

This document exists because various readers of uk.comp.sys.mac have
taken the time to contribute some of their knowledge or expertise to it.

CONTRIBUTORS

Daniele Procida (maintainer) Peter Ceresole David Byram-Wigfield Andrew
Fraser Devi Jankowicz Allan Sparrow

Except where indicated entries have been written by the maintainer.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

This document was created and is maintained by Daniele Procida. The
articles it contains have been written and contributed by members of the
newsgroup uk.comp.sys.mac. All contributions to this document remain the
property of their respective authors and may not be reproduced elsewhere
without their prior written permission.

2. The Macintosh family 2.1. The Macs

THE BEST MAC OF ALL TIME Tere have been many Macs since 1984. They were
all Macs, but for one reason or another some have been more popular or
better-loved than others, and some have acquired outstanding reputations
within the Macintosh user community.

But without question, the best Mac of all time must be the SE/30. Into
its unassuming little case and behind the pin-sharp black-and-white
built-in screen Apple packed a powerful computer which zipped along at
16MHz on a nice wide data bus. When it was launched in September 1989
(ten years ago to the month at the time of writing) it was one of the
most powerful Macs available. That's no longer the case, of course, but
all the same the SE/30 has proved in the intervening years to be one of
the most useful Macs ever made. Its built-in FPU meant it was able to
run software which even some later models couldn't. It was expandable up
to 128MB RAM (1000 times as much as the very first Mac, and all in a
case of the same size) which meant that it could keep pace with the
ever-increasing RAM demands made by software and users - in fact it
wasn't until the appearance of the PowerMacintosh 7100 over five years
later that its RAM expansion capability was bettered. It was the first
Mac to have the high-density SuperDrive as standard. In all, despite its
closed architecture and the lack of expansion card slots that the rest
of the world decried, the SE/30 was a thoroughly forward-looking
machine. It was also (like most Macs of those years) massively
over-engineered, which is why so many of them are still running reliably
today. Most have suffered no more than a little screen-burn and some
yellowing of the plastics, and some have spent almost every day of those
last ten years hard at work without a flicker of complaint. Sadly, Apple
decided not to name the machine the SE/x (the 'x' signifying the 68030
CPU) but apart from this minor failure of nerve they got almost
everything else right, and produced one of the most popular and
best-regarded computers ever made.

But without question, the best Mac of all time must be the IIci. No Mac
was in production nearly as long (almost three-and-a-half years, an age
as far as computers are concerned). During its production life it
watched various LCs come and go, as well as some of the Quadras that
should have rendered it obsolete. It wasn't until February 1993, on the
eve of the PowerMac, that the last IIci rolled off the Apple production
line - the IIci really was the Volkswagen Beetle of Macs. The IIci was
the fastest of the sensible Mac II series (only the fx with its
non-standard RAM SIMMs and non-standard serial ports that no-one ever
really supported properly was faster). It was the first Mac with a
built-in video output, though it was easy to upgrade with a more
powerful NuBus video card in one of the three slots (who ever needed the
six slots of the IIfx? and who ever needed them more than they needed
the huge area of deskspace it occupied?). This well-judged balance of
power, flexibility and moderation made the IIci such an attractive
machine to buyers at the time: the combination, including the price (and
this was something of a first for Apple), was just right. The IIci's
generous 25MHz clock speed gave it an extra lease of usable life (and
it's yet to run out as far as many users are concerned). Faster, better
video, or a second screen? Stick in a NuBus card. Ethernet, so it can
sit happily on a network with much newer Macs? Stick in a NuBus card.
ISDN? High-level audio work? NuBus had it all covered. In 1989 the IIci
had a wide-open future. In 1999 it has a glorious past.

But without question, the best Mac of all time must be the 9600. The
350MHz model (a PowerPC 604e) was the fastest Mac ever seen at the time
(1997) and its six PCI slots made it the machine for high-end video and
audio work. No Mac since then (much to the dismay of many of those
high-end users) has had six PCI slots, which means that many of them
refused to move on to Apple's G3 (and now G4) machines. Instead they
have kept their 9600s and simply upgraded the CPU, conveniently mounted
on a removable card (incidentally those slots and cards were housed in
Apple's much-admired K2 case, which gave the world a lesson in how to
make a computer's internals easily accessible). They have also kept
their old SCSI and serial ports, not to mention their floppy disk
drives, none of which are available any longer as standard on the Mac.
Ironically then, some of the most demanding Mac users are now using a
machine that was introduced in February 1997. Perhaps the advent of
FireWire will vitiate the need for those six PCI slots, but until it
does, the 9600 is going to be seen at work for many years to come in
recording and video production studios.

But without question, the best Mac of all time must be the iMac. Apple
finally - after 15 years - cracked the consumer market, and this was
without compromising power and speed. The original iMac boasted a 233MHz
G3, which at its launch made it faster than most Intel PCs available on
the market. Apple broke a few other things too, though, including the
mould of computing. Everyone knows what the iMac looks like now, and now
that outrageous and astonishing design has become familiar (and
inevitably, copied really badly by one or two computer companies who
clearly haven't grasped what the point was at all). The iMac took the
personal computer market by the scruff of its dirty neck and banged some
new ideas into its piggish head. The floppy disk drive? 1984. Get rid of
it. The serial ports? 1984. Get rid of them. SCSI? 1986. Get rid of it.
Instead we got a brand new interface standard, the Universal Serial Bus,
which had been languishing unimplemented for some time, and no choice.
That lack of choice forced both producers and consumers to adopt it; a
year on, USB has become a standard not only in theory but also in
practice. What's more, we can now see that we didn't really need the
floppy disk drive any more, or the old serial ports, or SCSI. The iMac
is the Macintosh ideal come to fruition - this was the first time that
computer technology was able to meet the demands of those ideals, and
computer design mature enough to implement them properly. In some
respects it is still too early to judge the iMac, since it represents
such a break with tradition in so many ways. Everyone 'knows' the iMac,
but they don't really. This is a computer whose success is going to be
judged by the effect it has on the future of personal computing. But we
don't need to judge the iMac as technological phenomenon in order to see
that this little machine is a giant amongst Macs.

THE WORST MAC OF ALL TIME

The worst Mac Apple ever made was the 4400. Next question?

Alright, this is what was wrong with it. First of all, it has to be
remembered that the 4400 was born during a fairly grim time for Apple.
The short-lived Macintosh clones had not been around long, and had
brought to the market two ideas unfamiliar to Apple: high specifications
at low prices (good) and hideous styling (bad). To some extent the two
went hand-in-hand, because the clone manufacturers were using parts,
tools and techniques that the ultra-high-volume Intel PC box-makers used
(some made a few ghastly attempts to 'style' their machines with
moulded-plastic face-plates which looked as though they had been
sculpted with shovels, but this was entirely superficial, and beneath
the waves, ripples and crenellations there were the same rectangular
boxes). Apple had to compete in the same market, and so design
considerations in the 4400 were sacrificed for ones of economy. The box
is a plain rectangular slab with none of the softness or confidence that
Macs have always displayed. Inside the box is a tangle of leads, and
sharp bits of metal which have to be screwed to one another (Mac users
had come to expect neat cable headers at just the right places for
internal drives and cards, and neatly-locking sliding plastic trays). It
is not clear at a glance how to remove this or that component.

Perhaps it seems odd that this should merit the 4400 such a title. After
all, the machine's styling is at least inoffensive, and compared to most
PCs looks quite elegant. More importantly, there is really nothing
functionally amiss with the machine, and it's CPU can even be upgraded
to a G3, bringing it up to speed with much newer machines. But what has
always earned it disdain was its conception, not its execution. Apple
users were naturally suspicious of the idea of of a Mac created in the
image of an ordinary PC, and even more suspicious of the reasoning
behind it. As it happened, the cloning experiment ended in failure (and
recriminations, too) when Apple (in the person of Steve Jobs) decided
that the clone-manufacturers were simply riding on the coat-tails of
Apple's research, design and marketing, and abruptly terminated their
licenses. With the end of cloning the pressure on Apple to produce
anything like the 4400 disappeared, and that was the end of that.

There is in fact another Mac vying for this title, though, and that is
the Performa 6200. It looked just like a Performa 630 (the only real
difference between them was the motherboard). But whereas the 630 was a
great little 68040 packed with multimedia hardware (TV card, video in,
CDROM), the 6200 was a crippled PowerPC 603 struggling along at 75MHz
and trying to manage some of the most unreliable System software Apple
had ever produced for the PPC (the same same software ran perfectly well
on the 68040). Its serial ports were also below standard, another victim
of Apple's drive to cut costs. It came with the spongiest Design
Keyboard ever imagined. Its video performance was desperately poor. And
then a huge number of them were shipped with defective ROM DIMMs, which
meant that a lot of software (Open Transport and MacOS 8 for example)
would not run on them. Although Apple is still running a Repair
Extension Program under which this can be fixed free-of-charge, it is
symptomatic of the 6200's failings.

Oddly, while the 5200 shares much of the 6200's hardware (it is
basically a 6200 with a built-in 15" monitor) it somehow does not exude
the same aura of cheapness, partly because its all-in-one design helps
remind one that it is, after all, a Mac.

2.2. Floppy disk drives

THE END OF THE FLOPPY DISK

When I was about nine years old, I saw an advertisement for panty-liners
in a women's magazine. It had a picture of an old-fashioned sanitary
towel, with the caption "Goodbye, and thanks". I didn't really know what
that was all about, but it was made clear that something had been
superceded.

The "Micro Floppy Diskette" - Sony's 3.5" design - has been with us
since the first Mac appeared. Back then - when it only held 400KB - it
was a great step forward from the 5.25" diskette. It held more data, was
smaller and more durable. Back then, everyone groaned that it wasn't
compatible with the 5.25" standard of the time, and Apple were
criticised for not complying. And now, the 3.5" floppy disk is as
ubiquitous as the Compact Cassette, it holds 1.4MB of data, and Apple
has abandoned it. It's 1984 all over again! When the iMac appeared,
there were howls of protest and snorts of derision at the foolishness
and inconvenience of a computer without a floppy disk drive.

But the floppy disk has not kept pace with other developments. The first
Mac had a 400KB floppy disk drive, and 128MB of RAM, a ratio of 1:0.32.
With the Mac Plus that ratio was 1:1.28, and the SE/30 1:4, and by the
era of the PowerMacintosh it was 1:32 and more. Everything else was
getting bigger (and faster) but not the floppy disk.

Now there are no Macs with built-in floppy disk drives anymore, and it's
really about time. To load software onto the machine there are CDROMs.
Files the size of those previously held on floppy disk can be exchanged
over networks, on Zip disks (not only bigger and faster, but also much
more reliable), by email and by infra-red transmission. Backups can be
made on CDROM or Zip. There is nothing that a floppy disk can do that
can't be done by other means. Of course, this hasn't suited everyone,
and has been a bit inconvenient for some. But external USB floppy disk
drives are readily available for those who really need them, so no-one
has really lost. Apple are once again dragging the personal computer
industry forwards, in the face of entrenched conservatism, and once
again it looks like they are winning the argument.

The 3.5" floppy disk has served us well, and has proved to be one of the
greatest industrial design successes of all time. But it's not a
suitable storage medium any longer, and its time is clearly up.

Goodbye, and thanks.

USB FLOPPY DISK DRIVES [Peter Ceresole]

USB floppy drives are easy to get, small and elegant and reasonably
priced if not actually cheap. Points to note; they draw power from the
USB port. The iMac and B&W G3s have two of those, and once you have
plugged in the keyboard only one is left free on the Mac; the only other
is a through port on the keyboard. If you are using a printer and a
floppy drive, the printer has to go into the keyboard port; the floppy
drive tries to draw too much power to work there, and you'll get an
error message.

Another problem is that system 8.5.1 does not support double density
(720K) floppy disks. It doesn't just refuse to read them, which would be
okay, but locks the Mac solid which requires a hard restart. No fun. A
clue; double density floppies have only one square hole at the base,
high density floppies have two. This serious bug has not been fixed in
system 8.6. Hell's bells.

If you want both a floppy and a Zip drive, either get a USB hub or use
the hot-plugging feature of USB to share a single port between two
devices.

[Some floppy disks in USB drives seem to take an age to mount, or even
to hang the Mac. This problem seems to be related to excessively
complicated desktop files on the disks, and deleting the desktop file
(hold down Option-Command while inserting the disk) seems to help.

Currently no USB floppy disk drives support Macintosh double density
(800K) disks (never mind the single-sided 400K versions). This is
because the Macintosh double-density format varied the rate at which the
disc span depending upon whether the heads were at the centre or the
edge. Spinning the disc more slowly enabled more data to be squeezed in
on the longer tracks at the edge. The PC double-density format didn't do
this, and so the two were incompatible. When high-density disks came
along, Apple abandoned its superior system in the interests of
compatibility with the majority (though its high-density disk drives
were of course backwards-compatible with the old ones). Now, the only
disk drives available for the Mac are third-party USB ones, which are
just cheap PC-style high-density drives (and can't even eject their own
disks), and can't read Mac double-density disks. This is why the Mac was
able to get 10% more data on the disk back then, and why it can't get it
off again now. - DMP].

3. The MacOS 3.1. Under the surface

KNOWN BUGS

INVISIBLE CHARACTERS [Peter Ceresole]

The Mac can put invisible characters into strings, so that they look
okay but in fact don't match what you want. This can cause apparently
crazy problems like your Mac not finding a server which looks perfectly
correctly typed in your settings. First step should be to write down the
required server name (it's incredibly easy to forget when you're going
to delete it), then completely delete your setting in the box and type
it in again.

You can introduce an invisible character in a number of ways; favourite
is to try to forward delete a character in a dialogue box. Nothing
happens, apparently, but you have introduced an invisible character
which you can't see, but which has become part of the string. If you
want to check this out before/instead of deleting the whole thing, just
put the cursor in the box and with the arrow keys, step through the
server name a character at a time, right to the end. At the end, make an
extra arrow key stroke to go "beyond" the end of the box, if you
get me, then step back in the other direction. If at any time, including
moving off from the end, a move of the cursor takes two key strokes,
you've found an invisible character. You can delete it in the normal way
with backwards delete. I only know all this because it happened to me
the first time I set up a Mac, after a year of successfully using the
same server with a PeeCee. Luckily there was a clued-up chap on Demon's
help desk who talked me through it.

Incidentally, I am staggered that Apple have retained what seems to me
to be a serious bug, all the way into system 8. And I still can't find a
reference to it in 8.1's help, or in the manuals of my G3. It's one of
the great unfixed stupidities of the Mac.

UKNOWN BUGS

Sorry, can't help. Nothing is known about these.

SCRAPBOOK AMAZINGNESS

The Scrapbook has been a part of the Mac's System software since the
beginning of time. Since then, it has always done pretty much what it
did in its earliest days, and not very much about it has changed. It
still comes pre-loaded with some astonishingly unattractive clip-art
(except the colour map. If you have a colour Mac, and the old
black-and-white Map Control Panel, copy the colour map and paste it into
the Control Panel. Now the world's in colour. You can do this with any
Scrapbook picture, by the way, but a map in the Map Control Panel makes
more sense than - say - one of those hideous teddy-bears). Drag-and-drop
arrived a few years ago, which made using the Scrapbook more convenient,
but that was about it.

Not really having kept step with the times in any visibly obvious
fashion, the Scrapbook attracts so little attention that one could be
forgiven for thinking that it doesn't actually do anything very useful,
or even well. But the Scrapbook's modesty conceals some pointed
cleverness.

Try this: copy some text and graphics from PageMaker, and try pasting
them into ClarisWorks (or some other program, to which this may or may
not apply - you'll have to find out). You'll paste in nothing but some
miserable unformatted text, which is obviously disappointing. So now
paste them into the Scrapbook instead. (In the information panel you'll
see something like Type: picture, text, ALD6, RTF, which shows that
something's going on). Now drag the lot from the Scrapbook into
ClarisWorks, and you will find that suddenly all your pictures, text and
formatting have been preserved - and you couldn't have done that without
the Scrapbook.

Actually, it's drag-and-drop that's really responsible for this, but
since PageMaker doesn't support dragging beyond its own windows, the
Scrapbook makes it possible. And as a bonus, to illustrate that a whole
is greater than the sum of its parts, Ungroup the objects that you
dragged into ClarisWorks. You are likely to find that the colours and
alignment of the objects go strangely wrong, and that any text you had
becomes blocky and ugly. I'm not sure what's going on here exactly, but
it seems that dissolving the glue which held the parts together
irremediably changes the whole.

WHO CAN USE VIRTUAL MEMORY?

Not all Macs can run Virtual Memory. Those with a 68000 processor (the
SE or plus, or the Portable or PowerBook 100) can't. The 68030 (SE/30,
or most of the Mac II series) can do virtual memory, and so can 68020s -
sometimes.

The Mac II can run Virtual Memory, but the LC can't. Like the Mac II,
the LC has a 68020, which requires a memory co-processor (the Motorola
Paged Memory Management Unit) in order to use Virtual memory. Unlike the
Mac II, the LC doesn't have a socket for it. And that's why you can't
use Virtual Memory on an LC.

SIMPLETEXT

SimpleText isn't actually part of the System software, but like your
daughter's boyfriend who never seems to go anywhere else, it might as
well be considered part of the furniture. Unlike your daughter's
boyfriend, SimpleText seems to multiply itself and can be found all over
your hard discs, and it's not uncommon to find ten or fifteen copies
scattered around each disc.

Most users don't (and don't need to) think about SimpleText much. It
just opens when needed. However, the occasion when they do start
wondering about it is when they get a message that the file they are
trying to open is too large for SimpleText. From Article no. 24923 in
Apple's Technical Information Library:

"SimpleText can only open text documents that are smaller than 32K in
size. Assigning more memory to SimpleText or quitting other programs is
useful when memory is low, but that is not the case here. SimpleText has
had a limit of 32K since it first appeared as TeachText with System
Software 7.0 in 1989. SimpleText relies on a set of routines in the Mac
OS called "TextEdit". TextEdit is a collection of routines and data
structures that give applications basic text formatting and editing
capabilities, including text display in multiple scripts. TextEdit
manages fundamental text processing tasks on text limited to 32 KB. For
detailed information about TextEdit, see the following section of Inside
Macintosh (a developer publication):

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Text/Text-40.html

SimpleText uses TextEdit because TextEdit works very well with the many
different languages that the Mac OS and SimpleText support.

To open text documents which are larger the 32K in size, one should
consider a freeware, shareware or commercial text editor or word
processing program that can open larger text documents."

3.2. The Macintosh Interface

SPACE, TIME AND THE ONE-BUTTON MOUSE

The idea of using Control to bring up the Contextual Menu is wholly
unsatisfactory. As well as a two-dimensional spatial aspect, the Mac
brought a temporal aspect to the computer interface, making it much more
like the real physical world we interact with all the time (for example,
a double-click is not just two clicks, but two clicks in a particular
temporal relation). This should be exploited, not ignored (and though
Apple have failed to do so properly, the shareware Control Panel
FinderPop does).

Spring-loaded folders are a great example of it, and a click-and-hold
function should be another (even bloody Navigator manages it). There are
rumours that future Mac mice may have a second button to make using
contextual menus easier. What a stupid idea. The single-button-mouse is
one of the enduring triumphs of the Mac, and I'd hate to see it be
replaced by some clumsy and arbitrary system of different buttons for
different functions. The single button makes the Mac mouse more like an
extension of one's own hand, and less like a scientific calculator. Just
looking at a one-button mouse shows you something filled with unity of
purpose, bursting with teleology - it's almost organic. A two-button
mouse is just another machine.

Now, there are those who like to have four programmable buttons on their
trackballs for example, and find it useful and convenient. I am not
saying they shouldn't do so, or that it shouldn't be made easy for them
to do so. But since such customisations are, if not arbitrary, then at
least matters of taste or personal preference, any move away from that
original simplicity should be an option and not forced upon us.

WORST INTERFACE FLAWS [Daniele Procida]

Nothing is perfect. Macintosh users can often be heard comparing the
Windows interface unfavourably with their own but in truth there are
some irritating flies in the MacOS ointment too:

1. Every now and then when some operation is performed in the Finder
(say you happen to open a folder containing a text clipping), the Mac
will decide it has to have a look at what's on the discs. Any disc that
wasn't already spinning will have to be spun up, so if you have a CDROM
in the drive, for example, you're going to have to wait a few seconds
while all that goes on.

2. There's no item in the Application menu called "Hide all but the
Finder".

3. Apple's documentation thinks that "alternative" and "alternate" mean
the same thing.

So the next time a Mac user begins complaining about Microsoft Windows
and its constant crashes, its hideous ugliness, clumsy inelegance, the
jerky mouse pointer and so on, remember that the MacOS interface is not
above serious criticism either.

ENHANCEMENTS

Since the Mac first appeared, the idea of the computer interface has
become one that is not merely the concern of computing theoreticians,
but something that everyone who uses a computer has some stake in, and
can demand a say in.

One manifestation of this claim upon the interface is the desire of
Macintosh programmers to make their own stamp upon it, by writing
programs that modify it in some way - small or large - that bring it
closer to their own ideal. The number of such offerings is simply
enormous. Of these, it must be said, a great number are more successful
in concept than execution, while many others seem to aspire to a fairly
odd ideal. But there are others which do seem to get both idea and
actuality about right, and which add something truly useful to the Mac.
Some are even (eventually) incorporated into the MacOS by Apple, which
is probably the most glorious endorsement available to their
programmers.

FINDERPOP

Turlough O'Connor, shareware $8, http://www.finderpop.com

I was delighted to discover FinderPop, because it put right one of the
more annoying Macintosh anomalies. With FinderPop the very useful MacOS
Contextual Menus can be used without having to fake using a two-button
mouse by pressing Control at the same time as clicking. Instead,
FinderPop makes proper use of the temporal aspect of the Mac's interface
- click and hold, and after a moment the Contextual Menu appears -
demonstrating that its author understands at least one important point
much better than some of Apple's programmers do (see Space, Time and the
One-Button Mouse for more on this question).

But FinderPop does more than right this wrong. From the manual:
"FinderPop is a control panel which extends the Mac OS 8 Finder's
contextual menus. Features include: user-selectable contextual menu
font/size/icon size, automagic CM popup by clicking and holding without
having to press the control key, disk, folder and StuffIt™ archive
navigation, and a number of optional submenus - including Processes,
contents of selected folder, Finder windows, FinderPop, and Desktop.
Additionally, it enhances navigation via the Standard File dialogs."

KEYQUENCER [Peter Ceresole]

It should never take more than one keypress to start a program and
configure it to run the way you want. On the Mac, this is not always the
simplest thing to organise - unless you call in the KeyQuencer Cavalry.

MSDOS (and CP/M before it) had a number of joys. Chief among them (maybe
the only real one) was its batch language. Not the command line - that
was an unmitigated horror in real life - but the ability to concatenate
simple commands to do frequently repeated tasks, some of them quite
complicated. This was missing on the Mac; frankly, AppleScript is too
much like proper programming, and is intimidating for simple punters.
It's also limited to scriptable applications. But there is KeyQuencer.

KeyQuencer (sometimes, weirdly, called "Key-Quencher" in the info-mac
listings, possibly one of the world's longest lived typos) allows you to
write short (or long) sequences of commands on the Mac, and assign them
to a single keypress (or combination of keys); anything you can select,
any button you can press, any menu item you can action. Swapping
applications, opening and/or closing applications, selecting favourite
folders within dialogue boxes. You can, with a little bit of cunning,
drag and drop items on screen and prompt for actions. You can even
change sound levels and screen resolutions, and directly open and close
PPP (but not OT/PPP and not ARA - although it's a piece of cake in that
case to do it via menus). It can make a command sequence specific to a
single application, or active at all times. You can add powerful macros
to simple text editors.

Programming is via a very neat editor which has built-in help at every
level. It's pretty simple, dumbo friendly and non-threatening to use.
All you have to do is imagine "Now how would I do that step by step,
using keyboard and mouse?" Trying things out - sub-routines even - is a
doddle.

I'm still using a very early, 68k coded shareware version which has
worked just about perfectly on everything from sys 7.0 to 8.1. There are
now Lite (free) and Pro (commercial) versions, which probably work even
better, although I can't see how they could; KeyQuencer transforms a
Mac. One without it feels dead to me. It's well worth trying and, nicest
of all, never messes anything up; no conventional extensions, no
clashes. A goodie.

POPCHAR [Peter Ceresole]

Popchar is a tiny, fun gizmo. It puts a symbol in the menu line (you
choose the place). Placing the arrow on the symbol produces a box
listing all the available characters in whatever font you are currently
using. Highlighting the character shows the ASCII code and the key
combination to produce it; lifting the mouse button puts the character
in at the insertion point.

Author is Gunther Blaschek, and it's postcardware (send him a postcard
of your home town). I sent him a London Underground map, and I dare say
he's had a few more of those, so try Big Ben...

Advantages; just wonderful.

Drawbacks; some have reported that it reduces graphic performance in the
Norton benchmarks, on a G3. Since PopChar is 68k code that may just be
true but on my G3, running SpeedDoubler, I've never seen a problem. Also
(according to the readme) has problems with some earlier versions of
Word. Well, surprise surprise.

It's still just wonderful.

[The original PopChar became PopChar Lite in version 2.7.2, which the
author described as freeware. He then put all his effort into a superior
version called PopChar Pro, which I believe is still being developed,
but is shareware, not freeware ($39, I believe). - Allan Sparrow]

4. Software 4.1. Word Processing

MICROSOFT WORD

Microsoft Word 5.1 appeared nearly seven years ago - that's when the
Macintosh IIci was still in production, for example - and it is still
not clear that Microsoft has really improved upon it. Word 5.1 did just
about anything that any normal word-processor user might want to do. It
does it well and it does it simply. It's very reliable, and fast and
smooth. It's pretty straightforward to use too, and has a good
(responsive and concise) help system built-in. It runs happily in less
than 1MB of RAM, so even an unexpanded Plus will be happy with it, and
continues to function with the latest MacOS software. This FAQ is
produced in Word 5.1, using System 7's Publish and Subscribe function to
incorporate a large number of individual files into a larger document,
where it automatically formats it all and produces a table of contents.

Microsoft followed this with Word 6, which was positively bristling with
features and which was supposed to give the world the last
word-processor it would ever need. Instead - for many people anyway - it
was the last word-processor they wanted to use. It was complicated and
messy, and on anything less than a fast Quadra so sluggish as to be
unusable. Behind this were two typical Microsoft traits: the desire to
produce a piece of software that will perform every possible function
that a user might demand of it, and the inability to translate such
extraordinary ambitions into efficient and well-written programs. Word 6
was intended to be not so much a mere word-processor as a complete
writing tool, which would join in with and contribute to all stages of
the process between putting thoughts into words and presenting them on
paper. Instead it was almost universally derided as 'bloatware' by
industry pundits, while the average user struggled to master it, wasting
much effort fighting off the endless dialog-box and menu options that
rose like thickets around the simplest tasks.

Word 98 followed, not so much a mere complete writing tool as an
alternative universe. There is truly something deeply and strangely
grand-minded about it, from its 'self-repairing' technology which
automatically re-installs any part of the software if it has gone
missing or been damaged, to the bizarre collection of characters which
inhabit the software, watching as you operate it and offering
suggestions and advice. Hubris, however, is narrowly avoided: the
program works in a way that Word 6 never did. In use it feels
considerably faster (perhaps simply because Macs had become faster
faster than Word had got bigger, but at least in part because Microsoft
had taken some of the criticism to heart). It still boasts (even more)
features that most people couldn't even imagine using, and still
consumes huge swathes of the hard disk, and still requires a generous
helping of memory, but on a half-decent PowerMac runs very nicely
indeed. Unexpectedly, the self-repairing installer works well (and has
since been extended to other Microsoft products) and it is not the
sinister Microsoftian scheme to take control of your Mac that was feared
when it was first launched.

However, Microsoft's casual attitudes towards data security are
manifested in all their glory. Word 98 is known to scoop up unrelated
data from your hard disk and to stuff them into your Word documents,
where they remain, invisible within Word itself, but very visible indeed
if you open up that Word document with a text editor such as BBEdit.
This means that when you send someone a Word document, or make one
publicly available over a network, you might also be making public quite
inappropriate information: the contents of private email mesaages, your
credit card numbers, or a list of web sites recently visited, for
example.

Equally worrying is the prospect of macro viruses. Word comes complete
with a powerful macro scripting language, intended to make repetitive
programmable tasks easier, and this has been used to wreak havoc upon
the computers of unsuspecting users - any Word document you receive may
contain a macro virus that has copied itself into it and which is ready
to carry out some vicious commands upon your files. This is not entirely
Microsoft's fault, but the thoughtless implementation of such powerful
facilities which makes such dangers an actual rather than a theoretical
risk is.

These are some of the intrinsic merits and faults of Word 98, but in
fact they are mostly irrelevant, and most important is a singular
extrinsic one: the fact that the vast majority of word-processor users
around the world are also using Microsoft Word (for Windows, mainly) and
that you will likely want to exchange documents with them. If you need
to exchange documents with Word users, and are not prepared to face all
the trials that converting between word processor formats entails, or to
persuade *them* to do the converting, *you* are going to have to
Conform. And that is the most compelling argument that Word has to
offer.

4.2. CAD

VECTORWORKS

VectorWorks 8 (which would have been called MiniCAD 8 if Diehl-Graphsoft
hadn't decided that Mini wasn't doing the program justice - and it
wasn't) is one of the best Macintosh CAD programs around.

Unfortunately Diehl-Graphsoft did nobody any favours, least of all
themselves, by releasing version 8.0 riddled with bugs. Though version
8.01 seems to have dealt successfully with most of them, the problem has
been compounded by the fact that (at the time of writing, June 1999) the
product is stillshipping in the 8.0 version without an update to 8.01,
or even any reference to the fact that the update is freely available.
The update, by the way, is a hefty 24MB download from
http://www.diehl-graphsoft.com. The updater updates not VectorWorks
itself, but the VectorWorks 8.0 installer, turning it into a VectorWorks
8.01 installer.

Since the program is priced at £500 plus VAT for a single-user license,
this is the computing equivalent of buying an up-market car and
suffering all kinds of problems. It keeps crashing into walls! It keeps
breaking down! It even seems to make your records skip and pop! You then
spend a lot of your time and money having your street repaved, and
taking driving lessons again (perhaps it's your fault. Perhaps the
road's not good enough). In desperation you even get to the point where
you paint your front door a different colour and put the record player
in a different room - after all, it could just be that. Then you
overhear in the pub that the manufacturer has discovered a number of
problems in the design, and has solved them with a new engine, which you
can obtain directly from them for no charge. However, you have to get it
home and fit it yourself.

Well, it's not really the equivalent, since we put up with it.

ART*LANTIS RENDER FOR VECTORWORKS

Art*Lantis 3.0 (from Abvent) is often touted as an ideal rendering
companion to VectorWorks. The Art*Lantis 3.0 package comes with an
External file and an Overlay for MiniCAD, enabling MiniCAD to export
objects directly into Art*Lantis Render. Unfortunately none of the
printed materials which accompany the program mention any of this, and
the information is buried in a PDF file on the installation CD. Also not
mentioned is that for VectorWorks rather than MiniCAD these files are
not what is required, and the appropriate Plug-in (not an External any
longer) must be dowloaded from http://www.artlantis.com. You then create
a new Art*Lantis Workspace in VectorWorks, following the inadequate and
unapologetic instructions which have to be downloaded separately.

So: before you spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on these products,
ask your retailer a couple of questions. Will you receive VectorWorks
8.01 rather than 8.0? And will you receive Art*Lantis with rather than
without the appropriate plug-in for VectorWorks? Make sure you do.

4.3. Utilities

DISK FIRST AID

Apple's Disk First Aid has come a long way. Before, it was unable to
repair any problems on the startup disk, or on the Disk First Aid disk.
Most of the time it couldn't repair the problem anyway.

Now - starting with version 8.2 - Disk First Aid can do all of those
things, and can also be set to run automatically after a crash requires
a restart (in the General Controls Panel, set the option to "Warn me if
computer was shut down improperly"). Version 8.2 later is required for
disks running HFS+ (Macintosh OS Extended format) and is able to repair
inadvertant damage caused to them by other disk utilities which may not
be compatible (for example, versions of Norton Utilities earlier than
4.0)

NORTON UTILITIES [Peter Ceresole]

Norton is the best thing to happen to the Mac.

Mac systems (in my personal experience of 7.0, 7.1, 7.1.2, 7.5.1, 7.5.2
and 8.1- your mileage may vary) are pretty robust. The filing system
stays on its feet for years, buckling at the knees a bit when the desk
top isn't rebuilt in the course of two years' operation, by three users
each of who successively deletes most of the previous owner's files, and
carries straight on. Straight up; I've seen Mac LCIIs at the Beeb used
this way, running Word 5 and Excel 5, CompactPro and and Filemaker Pro
(not simultaneously) in 4Mb of RAM, over sys 7.1 on a LAN with 40Mb HDs
with, by the end, about 4Mb of space free. Amazing; after a desktop
rebuild, they were basically as good as new, meaning tectonically slow
('glacially' slow doesn't do them justice) but gracefully running apps
in that inimitable Mac way. No glitches, no problems.

But put Netscape or Ineternet Explorer on a Mac, put it on the Net and
run some alpha/beta software, why not? No probs, them maybe a few little
glitches and then suddenly... Sad Macs, fire it up from the Disk Tools
floppy (remember those?) or the system CD-ROM and the hard disk won't
mount... Panic time. Horrid.

All Macs not being used in absolutely stable environments with reliable
software can build up nasty secret little filing system errors. They
should be checked regularly, and fixed if necessary.

There were always two choices. Disk First Aid was free with the OS.
Frankly, until the latest versions that came with sys 8.+ and are pretty
good, you got what you paid for. It worked well for some OSs in some
versions but in my experience it caused more harm than it cured. And
even the latest versions give up comparatively easily, and only check
the filing system, not the files themselves. They can have damaged
resource forks or other problems; Disk First Aid won't say.

For that all round capability you need Norton Utilities; not free, but
bloody terrific. I have seen deeply, totally trashed HDs brought back
from non-existence by the repeated running of Norton Disk Doctor. In
these cases Disk First Aid was advising reinitialising the disk, and so
after a first pass was Norton; the difference was that as far as Disk
First Aid was concerned, that was all she wrote, while Norton would get
further and further in on each pass, failing later and later until it
came out the other side. I've done this on a HFS formatted SCSI HD on a
6100 and on a HFS+ formatted ATA drive in a B&W G3 - trashing caused
respectively by Netscape 1.2 (all those years ago) and by some
funny-wunny font management program. The G3's HD had (according to the
diagnostics) several thousand cross-linked files. In fact Norton fixed
about 300 of them and suddenly the disk was okay. Very few files were
lost- in single figures. It's been running Cubase and Photoshop plus all
the Net apps without a glitch ever since.

Norton v 3.5.x worked fine on HFS formatted drives, but trashed HFS+
volumes. 3.5.2 was clever enough to refuse to touch them. Version 4.0
was supposed to fix that but was riddled with killer bugs; don't touch
it.

But v 4.0.1 and above works on both formats, and works well. I can
personally vouch for the soundness of 4.0.2. Latest version is 4.0.4.

Norton Utilities also includes backup tools (but it's easier to copy
straight to a Zip/Jaz), erased file recovery tools (work pretty well)
and permanent erase tools (work fine). There's also a benchmarking
application. I think that's one for the lads but I confess that I use
it... Just to see the benefits of all that money on the go-faster
stripes.

Then there's Norton CrashGuard. Frankly, it seems to cause more problems
than it solves. There's also Speed Disk that optimises a drive; on
older, slower HDs it seemed to offer a real benefit. On new, large, very
fast HDs it seems to make a lot less difference.

Still, for the basic security it brings, get Norton; I couldn't imagine
using a Mac for any period without it.

ALSOFT DISKWARRIOR

Every so often something genuinely new comes along, and a short while
later you wonder how you managed without it. DiskWarrior is one of those
things. It does just one thing: it repairs disk directories. Compared to
the panoply of functions that Norton Utilities or TechTool Pro can
boast, it might seem a rather meagre offering. There are two things to
consider though: firstly, that one thing is what needs to be done in the
vast majority of disk problem cases, and secondly, it does it
fantastically well.

This is what Alsoft have to say about DiskWarrior: "It rebuilds your
disk directory using data recovered from the original directory,thereby
recovering files and folders that you thought were lost. The directories
DiskWarrior creates are also optimized for maximum directory
performance. DiskWarrior is not a disk repair program in the
conventional sense. It does not attempt to solve all of the possible
problems that can occur with a disk. It specializes in eliminating
directory errors. Directory errors are the most common problems Mac OS
users have with their disks. DiskWarrior rebuilds your disk directories
making them error-free, eliminating any problems the errors would have
caused, and recovering lost files. It fixes any problem with master
directory blocks and alternate master directory blocks (HFS), volume
headers and alternate volume headers (HFS Plus), volume bit maps,
catalog trees, and extents trees."

Not being a Macintosh disk filing system expert, I am not really in a
position to comment in any really knowledgeable way about how
DiskWarrior works. As someone who has used DiskWarrior countless times
on a great number of different Macintoshes, I am however able to say
that it *does* work, effectively, reliably and faultlessly. It is so
easy to use that if you could train a monkey to press the "Rebuild"
button at the appropriate moment the monkey could probably earn a decent
living in Macintosh repair. It is so fast that you only have time to
bite your nails once or twice before discovering that it has indeed kept
its promises and rescued the missing data and put your disk back in
order. And above all, once it has rescued you from a few sticky
situations which made Norton Disk Doctor crash horribly and which were
so bad that TechTool Pro didn't even realise they were sticky you begin
to realise that after all you *don't* need to bite your nails, because
DiskWarrior is on your side and you are going to win.

Although I am not a monkey, I do earn a living in Macintosh repair. I
can't imagine doing it without DiskWarrior now.

DiskWarrior is available on CD, or can be downloaded from
www.alsoft.com.

4.4. Education

BERLITZ THINK AND TALK

Unfortunately most of thinking that goes on in this range of
CD-ROM-based language courses is a baffled struggle to understand
anything. This is not helped by the complete absence of instructions
worth the name, and an interface covered in confusing buttons. But even
if the instructions were so good that even a slug could understand how
to operate the program, and even if the interface were so intuitive that
a Mongolian yak-herder would grasp it immediately, neither of them would
learn much Italian (or German, or French, or Spanish) because the
program is such a poor teacher.

After completing the course a student would have learnt lots of words,
and many sentences, but for the most part not what they mean, nor how to
assemble them in order to say anything new. A complete newcomer to the
language will struggle to make any progress at all. Someone who has
already made a small start will be more usefully served, but even so,
the best this program can really do is help reinforce what has already
been learned elsewhere.

To add a gratuitous insult to these pedagogic injuries, the Macintosh
version of the program lacks the speech recognition feature of the
Windows version.

4.5. Internet

OUTLOOK EXPRESS

Microsoft, free

Thanks to Apple's 1997 deal with Microsoft, Outlook Express has become
one of the most widely-used Mac email clients. Outlook Express (what is
that name supposed to mean?) is a combined emailer/newsreader, with a
vast array of features. Microsoft don't charge for the program, which is
installed by default by the MacOS installers and is readily available
for downloading over the Internet and on all the cover-mounted CDs that
Macintosh magazines offer.

There are a number of bad things about Outlook Express, unfortunately.
The first and worst is that it's free. The second is that it's so
readily available. At least if Microsoft were asking money for the thing
fewer people would use it. As it happens, in operation it is simple
enough to use. The difficulty lies in working out how to operate it. Its
interface is a bewildering mess, sporting more buttons than a pimp's
outfit in an episode of Starsky and Hutch, and half of these buttons do
completely counter-intuitive things anyway; setting any preferences in
the program means you run the risk of losing all the other Internet
preferences you may have spent time setting up, because it will write
all over them without any warning or permission whatsoever; and to add
insult to all these injuries Outlook Express defaults to HTML-format
message composition and non-standard handling of quoted material, so
that unsuspecting users will incur the disgust and disdain of everyone
they correspond with.

As a newsreader, it's even worse.

You deserve better than Outlook Express, unless you've done something
really bad. And even if you have, others don't deserve the suffering
your use of it will inflict on them. You should mortify your flesh
instead.

EMAILER I

Claris, free

Emailer is quite a sweet piece of work, despite some limitations and
some very annoying bugs. It is by far one of the most attractive email
programs to look at, and thanks to its thoughtful use of colour and
9-point Geneva manages to cram a lot of information into a small space
without looking cluttered or confusing. Somehow its visual design guides
the eye in just the right ways, and the eye guides the hands to just the
right places on-screen. This is a remarkable feat, and beginners (but
not just beginners) often love it for this reason. It is also extremely
easy to get to grips with.

Emailer's limitations make it unsuitable for those whose email needs are
more demanding. It can manage a maximum of five email accounts (only one
in the Lite version), and while its filing system for keeping messages
is simple to use, it is also a little primitive. Searching through any
quantity of saved messages is astonishingly slow, and doesn't cover
messages still in the In Box. It is only possible to order messages
stored in its various Filing Cabinet folders by Subject or Date (whereas
the In Box and Out Box offer numerous other options, including the
all-important one to sort by Author). This all conspires to make
locating particular messages a trying affair.

More serious are the bugs, which affect even those with limited demands.
Emailer manages to create incorrect x-sender headers, sending out the
POP account details instead. This has to be corrected (automatically,
elsewhere down the line of communication) using the details in the From
header. I am not sure of any serious consequences that might arise, but
all the same this could be a problem. Another bug, only recently
discovered, is that Emailer gets confused by 1999 dates. If your email
preferences are set to show the date and time that received messages
were sent to you, the program will claim that some of them were sent in
1919. This is more of a blasted nuisance than a serious problem, but it
can, for example, make following discussions in mailing-lists very
difficult.

MUSASHI

Sono Software, shareware $33, http://www.sonosoft.com/musashi/

For a program written and maintained by single author, Musashi sports
some surprising and impressive features: hierarchical mail folders,
multiple accounts, multiple users and multiple language support
(including Japanese). It looks attractive - its author clearly has a
good eye for design - and its interface is well-engineered, with only
minor complaints. Much of this is achieved with good use of icons
supported by optional text tags. It works well, and is comfortable to
use. It runs happily in 2.7MB of RAM, and occupies little more than 1MB
of disk space. It also has some nice touches, including one I have not
seen before: a New Mail window displaying the most recently received
messages, no matter where the filtering system has filed them.

Musashi is an agreeable program to work with, but it is very badly let
down by some surprising examples of poor design. The most serious
problem is that Musashi fails to respect one of the fundamental rules of
email correspondence, which dictates that in replying to a message one
should only quote relevant material. Instead it follows Microsoft's
appalling example and appends the entire message to the reply, offering
no option to quote selectively. This alone is reason enough not to use
it, and it is compounded by another serious problem: Musashi doesn't
wrap quoted text properly, leaving lines broken up, and having to be
repaired manually. Between them this pair of nuisances impose a lot of
extra and quite unnecessary work on the user who wants to send
decently-formatted email replies. This is a shame, because other defects
in the program are mostly quite minor. The documentation could be more
extensive, some of the screen views attempt to cram too much into a
single window, and the scroll bars seem to have a very odd idea of
porportionality, but that's about it in the way of genuine complaint.

Musashi is currently in version 3.1. If a future version addresses the
problems the program has handling replies, Musashi will be a remarkably
good email client.

POWERMAIL

CTM Development, $49, http://www.ctmdev.com

For those whose email requirements are more complex, PowerMail attempts
to provide a solution which combines an extensive set of mail-management
functions with a clear and elegant interface. Mostly, it gets it right,
though where it does miss the mark it is not in the favour of
intuitiveness.

PowerMail boasts an extensive set of mail-management features, including
support for IMAP servers, multiple users, an indexing facility based on
the Apple Information Access Toolkit (just like Sherlock) and -
crucially for some users - support for non-Roman script systems, such as
Cyrillic and Japanese. This alone may make the choice for some. All of
this could add up to a messy and baffling interface and
command-structure, but doesn't.

Still, while PowerMail is certainly powerful enough for most users, and
simple enough to use, it is marred by a number of minor flaws. A certain
amount of space is wasted on-screen, and not to any any obvious
aesthetic gain; there are various operations which require one or two
steps more than should be necessary; not all aspects of the interface
follow a uniform pattern. There are other minor complaints.

One more serious problem is the way mail is queued for sending. Unless
PowerMail is set to send mail immediately (for example if one has a
permanent TCP connection) sending a message only queues it, and it is
not really sent until the connection is made. But sometimes (just
sometimes - it seems to be inconsistent) even then it doesn't get sent.
This is annoying, especially if you do not discover that the mail wasn't
sent until after you have disconnected.

A free 30-day demonstration version is available for download, which can
then be registered and unlocked after the trial period. Site licences
are also available.

MAILSMITH

Bare Bones Software, $79 ($59 for BBEdit owners),
http://www.barebones.com

Bare Bones Software's BBEdit has become an indispensable program for
HTML programmers and others who require no-nonsense heavy-duty
text-editing tools. With Mailsmith the company is obviously hoping to do
the same for those who require a powerful and flexible email program. If
you are familiar with BBEdit then you probably have a pretty good idea
of what to expect from Mailsmith - they are clearly from the same
family.

Mailsmith can do just about anything you want it to do with your mail.
it handles numerous accounts well (and one especially useful feature is
that it is capable of accessing all of them simultaneously, rather than
sequentially). It offers nested mailboxes for stored mail, and a search
system whose only limitation seems to be that it is unable to find
misplaced car keys. It can search for simple Literal strings, Grep
patterns and can even look for approximate matches in a Fuzzy search
(extremely handy for retrieving half-remembered messages lost deep in
the ancient history of last year's mail archives). There are a powerful
set of mail filters to match these search capabilities.

All these features and power don't make Mailsmith a difficult program to
use, though the 11 menus it puts in the menu bar inevitably look a
little intimidating. It's simple enough to set the program up for use,
but the fact that there are so many other options too makes it less than
obvious to the beginner what's important. And while it is by no means an
unfriendly program, its interface is clearly nowhere near as inviting
and intuitive as that of Emailer - but then, whose is? The interface is
logical and well-thought-out - it's just that of necessity there's a lot
of logic at work.

Mailsmith doesn't support IMAP (yet) though for most people that is not
yet an issue. If it becomes one, it may be taken almost for granted that
it will be answered. Bare Bones invite suggestions and requests for
future versions, and respond promptly and helpfully to enquiries.

It is interesting to compare Mailsmith with PowerMail. The latter
certainly appears to be easier to use, but after a while of actual use,
it is much less clear. PowerMail has the overall picture more-or-less
right, but there are a number of small details which are somehow wrong
with it. In themselves, they are insignificant; put together, they do
mar the program significantly. By contrast, Mailsmith's details are
mostly much better considered - in use, Mailsmith simply feels better.

Having said that, some aspects of Mailsmith are fairly baffling. The
mail queuing system seems to take an all-or-nothing attitude. Once the
Queue button has been pressed, that's it - you aren't going to be able
to change the subject, or the recipients, or the account from which it
will be sent. And unless a message has been queued, the only way to save
it for further work is as a text file, since it doesn't allow for draft
messages. These are both serious problems, symptoms of a classic
programmer's disease: the bull-goose loony filtering system could have
waited for version 2.0, but a sensible means of revising outgoing mail
really should have been in there from the very start.

Mailsmith is available from the URL above in a 30-day demonstration
version.

MACSOUP

Stefan Haller, shareware $20, http://www.snafu.de/~stk/macsoup/

MacSOUP (now in version 2.4.2) is extremely well-regarded, and is
probably the best offline newsreader available for the Mac. It's also a
perfectly capable email client. It works on any Mac from a Plus upwards,
and will run happily in 2.5MB of RAM. MacSOUP offers a number of
features which make news-reading easier, amongst them a graphical
representation of the thread, and the ability to download only news
headers (rather than the full content of each article) and then to
select some - either manually or automatically based upon your own
criteria - for a full download.

But MacSOUP's best feature is its unshakeable unreliability - it never,
ever, crashes or goes wrong. It is also an extremely well-behaved
program in other ways, and conforms strictly to Internet RFCs. Its
author has included his own email address in the program's address-book,
and responds promptly to queries and other correspondence.

MacSOUP's limitations are partly a result of this insistence that
everything should work perfectly. It is not suited to multiple users,
and its handling of binaries is basic, to say the least. Though
developments are promised for future versions, progress is steady but
slow.

NEWSHOPPER [Peter Ceresole]

Laurent Humbert

NewsHopper was the first good off-line news reader for the Mac. When it
appeared, it transformed Net use for non-USAns who paid for their phone
connect time. It was a commercial program (but after the first months,
at close to a shareware price) and was good value even at the original
cost. There was a free demo version limited to five newsgroups.

Chief virtue is a superb search system with full regexp capabilities.
Another, its ability to use any text editor of your choice (or the
built-in editor). It has great simplicity in switching news servers
and/or news databases, good archiving abilities, full scriptability in
versions above 1.3 and for mail, seamless integration with Eudora. It
retrieves articles by number and can, if you specify, fetch headers
only, which you can check and mark for later download.

Bugettes are its inability to handle more than 32k newsgroups (there's
an easy workaround in 1.3b, but it's still a workaround) and before the
final version (1.3b again) newsgroup names longer that 256 characters
would crash the program. Again, you could work round it, but it wasn't
neat. Finally, the fully scriptable versions (1.3 onwards) have a bug
that prevents sending articles larger than 15k. I used it for two years
before I discovered that...

Oh, and it doesn't do X-faces. But then this is supposed to be a list of
disadvantages, isn't it?

Unfortunately, that remains the state of play; the author, Laurent
Humbert, a Frenchman living in Britain, got ME a few years ago and had
to stop all work. He is now well and back in harness, but he's announced
no plans to return to NewsHopper, although he still replies to email and
newsgroup requests for help. And it's still a superb news reader. You
simply can't buy it (I suppose there are workarounds for that).

ADOBE PAGEMILL

PageMill makes the creation of web pages painlessly simple, as long as
the pages are to be pretty simple themselves. It presents a more-or-less
What You See Is What You Get view of your pages, which can be easily
toggled with a Preview mode in which it behaves like a browser. This
helps get an even better idea of what your work will look like to other
users, and enables you to follow links within the site and test its
structure.

Despite supporting frames, tables, forms and Java applets PageMill has
its limitations, and they make themselves immediately apparent. Its
handling of frames in particular is worse than limited - it will create
multiframe documents, but offers no way of removing frames from pages.
This has to be done by hand-editing the HTML source (something the
manuals cunningly manage to avoid saying outright) and while it's simple
enough if you know how, it does rather miss the point of having a
program which is supposed to do it for you. Still, PageMill does the
basic things, and could hardly make them any simpler.

PageMill also has basic site-management features, though trying to
manage a complex site could quickly become a trying business. This FAQ
has been largely created and maintained in PageMill, and is about as
complicated a set of pages as the program will comfortably manage.

It is worth noting that PageMill (in common with almost all web-design
programs) does not produce HTML that conforms to proper standards. In
practice this does not seem to cause problems, but like all such
carelessness it is likely to have consequences eventually for someone
somewhere.

5. Printing 5.1. Printer hardware

USB STUPIDITY

Epson's Stylus range of colour inkjet printers offer marvellous printing
quality and appalling drivers. At least they're shipping with drivers
now; owners of the first Stylus Color 740s who wanted to use them with
their iMacs (since the 740 was the first USB printer available)
discovered that the Mac drivers supplied didn't support USB printing,
and the correct ones had to be obtained elsewhere. The drivers are still
fairly unreliable (particularly the USB drivers) and crude in many ways,
though they are certainly improving. You may experience all kinds of
oddness: printers suddenly not being acknowledged by the Mac, strange
keyboard freezes and other problems. You can often get things back to
normal by unplugging the printer's USB cable for a moment or two then
plugging it back in again. However, without question the best advice is
to check at http://www.epson.co.uk to make sure that you have the very
latest driver software.

Some of the Extensions installed by the Epson installers are no longer
required. In MacOS 8.51 onwards, the Apple USBPrintDriver does the work
of the four Epson USBPrintClass Extensions (which in any case are known
to be troublesome, and may as well be removed from the System Folder).

WHEN THE PRINTER PLAYS DEAD

When the printer's not communicating with the Mac, for example when it's
switched off or in a red-light mode (the paper has jammed, or the ink
run out, perhaps) you'll notice that selecting the it in the Chooser
does not bring up the "USB port" item on the right-hand-side, Background
printing can't be turned on or off, and the driver reports a problem
when trying to print. At least, that's what it should do. Sometimes it
won't report any problem; it'll simply do nothing, which can lead one to
suspect any number of different causes.

This is the sort of thing that has exasperated users of these Epson
inkjets. That the printer should refuse to do anything at all just
because it's out of ink is a really stupid design feature, but that the
driver fails to report that there's a problem compounds it unforgivably.
Fortunately, it is possible to regain control of the printer, and (for
example) print in black & white even if the colour ink has run out.
Simply go through the steps to install a new cartridge and put the old
one back in. Since it keeps track of how much ink it thinks has been
used since the cartridge was installed, and not how much is actually
left, the printer will think it has a full one and will come to life
again.

MANAGING WITHOUT A POSTSCRIP RIP [David Byram-Wigfield]

Colour matching apart, you can get excellent results on an Epson without
needing a PS RIP by scanning at 150 dpi; importing into PhotoShop as
RGB; adjust levels (auto); unsharp mask once or twice; adjust mid range
transfer to 60%; save as an RGB EPS. Set Distiller colour bitmap job
options to 150 dpi, auto compression and zip medium, and distill.

Print the resulting PDF at 720 on appropriate Epson paper using Error
Diffusion - Automatic or Photo. Do not use ColorSync. Avoid Photo
Enhance as it takes longer, uses more memory, and the extra ink makes
the paper wavy. Compare the printed colours with the original. To
correct, go back to PhotoShop and adjust the Hue and Saturation levels.
Experience will tell you what to do to which and by how much.

The beauty of this process is that (for example) an EPS book dustjacket
of 5 Meg emerges as a PDF of 300k and prints in less than one minute!
Remember that Epson printing dpi bears little or no relation to scanning
or compression dpi.

SHARING EPSON PRINTERS

It can be done. See Sharing printers.

5.2. Sharing printers

Although most inexpensive inkjet printers (and also a number of very
expensive ones, including many plotters) are not designed to be used on
a network as stand-alone devices, many can be used over a network by
sharing them. The printer is not attached directly to the network, but
to one of the computers on the network. That computer then makes it
available across the network to other computers. The advantages of this
system are cost (since the printer can be designed and manufactured
without the need for expensive networking hardware and software) and
flexibility (the printer can be used with any kind of network, not just
the one it was designed for). It does mean though that one of the
computers on the network will have to act as a print server. This is
ideal if there's a spare Mac on the network but very annoying if there
isn't, at least for the person who is trying to work on a Mac which is
constantly slowing to a crawl because it's busy dealing with a printer.

APPLE PRINTERS

Most Apple StyleWriters and some of the lower-end LaserWriters can be
shared. Once the device has been selected as a printer on the server, it
can be set up within the Chooser as a shared printer. Other users on the
network who then select the appropriate drivers in their Choosers will
see the shared device as an available option.

It is important to make sure that the printer drivers installed on the
server and client Macs are of the same version (and if those Macs are
not using the same version of the System software, that may sometimes
not be possible). This system can also be extremely difficult to
trouble-shoot, and problems on the server may produce very inconsistent
problems amongst the clients. The first step is therefore to make sure
that the server is working correctly (and can for example print itself)
before turning your attention to the clients.

EPSON PRINTERS

Although the drivers supplied by Epson do not permit the Stylus range of
inkjets to be shared over a network, there is a third-party solution.
EpsonShare (shareware E25, Gérard Ceccaldi,
http://www.ses.fr/epsonshare/) consists of a server and a client
program. The client program spools the print files to a folder on the
server (so File Sharing on the server must be enabled, and the serer's
hard disc mounted on the client). The server program looks out for them
and passes them on to the driver. It works well enough, though it is at
this stage a little crude. EpsonShare requires MacOS 8 or later.

6. Networking 6.1. Ethernet

TWISTED-PAIR ETHERNET CABLES

Four wires, in two pairs, do the work in twisted-pair ethernet cables.
Two wires carry traffic in one direction, and two in the other. The
pairs are twisted round each other to help cancel out crosstalk and
minimise noise on the line which might disrupt communications. The two
pairs used are:

Pin 1: Rx+ Pin 2: Rx-

Pin 3: Tx+ Pin 6: Tx-

There are usually eight wires, which means the other two pairs are
unused. You don't have to know all this, but it's good to know things.

Making your own 10/100Base-T cables

You'll need some CAT5 twisted pair cable, RJ-45 plugs, a crimping tool
and some patience if you're doing it for the first time. Only four wires
in the cable are used, though probably yours will be supplied with
eight. You can either ignore the unused four if you want, but for the
sake of neatness (and possibly some future use) you might as well
connect up the other four too.

To find Pin 1 on an RJ-45 plug, hold it up in front of you with the
release tag facing away from you and the plug pointing upwards. Pin 1 is
on the left.

Prepare your cable: with the tool, cut a nice square end, and then use
the stripper to remove the appropriate amount sheath. Fan out the wires
from left to right like this:

Pin 1: white with orange stripe Pin 2: orange with white stripe Pin 3:
white with green stripe Pin 4: blue with white stripe Pin 5: white with
blue stripe Pin 6: green with white stripe Pin 7: white with brown
stripe Pin 8: brown with white stripe

The ones which matter are Pins 1, 2, 3 and 6.

Push the wires into the plug, making sure they go right to the end, then
put the plug into the crimping tool and squeeze it hard. Do the same at
the other end, and you have made an ethernet cable. If you can, test it
by connecting it where another cable is known to be working.

CROSSOVER CABLES

In a normal ethernet cable, the connections are straight through; that
is to say, Pin 1 connects to Pin 1 at the other end, Pin 2 goes to Pin 2
and so on. If two devices were connected to each other directly with a
straight-through cable, both would be trying to transmit on the same
wires, and neither would be listening on the others.

When you speak to someone on the telephone, the two earpieces are
connected not to each other but to the mouthpieces - the two connections
cross over each other. This is what a crossover cable does, making it
possible to connect two devices directly without going through a hub. In
such a cable, the pin-outs are reversed at one end, so that the
transmitting pins of one device are connected to the receiving pins of
another:

Pin 1 - Pin 3 Pin 2 - Pin 6 Pin 3 - Pin 1 Pin 6 - Pin 2

That is, at the 'other' end of a crossover cable your wires should be
(if you do all eight) as follows:

Pin 1: white with green stripe Pin 2: green with white stripe Pin 3:
white with orange stripe Pin 4: brown with white stripe Pin 5: white
with brown stripe Pin 6: orange with white stripe Pin 7: white with blue
stripe Pin 8: blue with white stripe

It should be noted that not all Macintoshes or versions of the MacOS
properly support crossover cables. Some seem to require that a working
ethernet device be on the other end of the cable before agreeing to
switch AppleTalk onto Ethernet. If you need to have two of these trying
to talk to each other at the same time, you may be out of luck, because
neither of them will jump first. It is not entirely clear which Macs or
which versions of the MacOS are the unco-operative ones, so you'll just
have to experiment.

COLOUR-CODING

It doesn't matter really what colour wires get connected where, since
the electrons don't mind. The important thing is that the pins are
connected to each other in the correct arrangement. However, the codes
given above are the standard arrangement, and you should stick to it if
only to make life easier for yourself or someone else in the future.

7. Troubleshooting and repairs 7.1. Before you reach for a
screwdriver

PARAMETER RAM

Your Mac contains a small amount of battery-backed memory on the clock
chip, in which a number of System settings are stored. Settings stored
include date and time, hours of use, startup drive, default font and so
on. PRAM Inspector (EasySoft, http://pages.infinit.net/trottier/) will
tell you what some of these settings are.

RESETTING THE PARAMETER RAM

Sometimes these settings can become corrupted, causing all kinds of
strange problems, and many therefore can be solved by resetting the
PRAM.

TechTool (MicroMat, http://www.micromat.com/) will do this job for you,
and in fact will do a more thorough job, since it will reset parts of
the PRAM that the methods below can't always reach.

PRE-SYSTEM 5

Remove the battery from the rear compartment, wait a few seconds, then
replace it.

SYSTEM 5-6

Open the Control Panel, while holding down Command-Option-Shift. Select
"Yes" in the box that appears. When the Control Panel opens, close it,
then restart the Mac.

SYSTEM 7 AND LATER (NON-PCI MACS)

Hold down Command-Option-P-R while starting up the Mac (and before the
"Welcome to Macintosh" message appears), until you hear the startup
sound for a second time. Then let go. You'll probably have to reset some
of your Control Panels.

PCI-BASED MACS (INCLUDING PCMCIA POWERBOOKS)

A well as battery-backed PRAM PCI-based Macs have NVRAM (non-volatile
RAM) which stores display settings.

Hold down Command-Option-P-R immediately after pressing the Power key (
before the grey screen appears), until you hear the startup sound for a
second time. Then let go. You'll have to reset some of your Control
Panels. To make sure the NVRAM is reset as well as the PRAM, the machine
has to be turned off - not just restarted - before pressing Power.

THE POWER MANAGER

All PowerBooks contain something called a Power Manager, a circuit which
controls and monitors the way the PowerBook is using the available
power. This includes the display backlight, hard disk spinning, sleeping
and waking, battery charging, control of the trackpad. It also monitors
activity on the serial ports to make sure the PowerBook doesn't shut
itself down while a connection is in progress.

Occasionally, the Power Manager gets itself in a muddle. As a result,
the machine will sometimes play dead, or the batteries won't charge up,
or don't last as long as they should do. The answer to many PowerBook
ills is to reset the Power Manager. Instructions follow; you might also
want to try ResetPwrMgr (Randall Voth, freeware) which claims to be able
to do the same thing.

POWERBOOK 100

Remove the AC adaptor and the battery, and set the battery contact
switch on the rear of the unit to the down position. Leave the machine
without power for about 3-5 minutes, then press and hold the reset and
interrupt buttons (on the side) for 15 seconds. Replace the battery,
plug it in, turn the switch on the back up again.

POWERBOOK 140, 145, 145 B AND 170

Remove the AC adaptor and the battery. Leave the machine without power
for about 3-5 minutes, then press and hold the reset and interrupt
buttons (on the back) for 15 seconds. Replace the battery and plug the
adaptor back in.

POWERBOOK 160, 165, AND 180

Remove the AC adaptor and the battery. Leave the machine without power
for about 3-5 minutes, then press and hold the reset and interrupt
buttons (on the back) for 15 seconds. Replace the battery and plug the
adaptor back in.

POWERBOOK 150

Remove the AC adaptor and the battery. Press and hold the reset button
(on the back) for 15 seconds. Plug the adaptor back in, and briefly
press the reset button again. Press the main power button to start up,
then put the battery back in.

POWERBOOK 500 SERIES

Remove the AC adaptor and the battery. Leave the machine for about 3-5
minutes without power, then press and hold Command-Option-Control-Power
for 5-10 seconds. Replace the battery and plug the adaptor back in.

POWERBOOK DUO

Press and hold the power button on the rear of the 200 or 2300 series
computer for 30-45 seconds to reset the Power Manager. To purge the
Power Manager code, remove all power sources for 10 minutes. If you have
the machine open you can remove the internal back-up battery to achieve
this.

POWERBOOK 190/5300

Unplug the AC adaptor and remove the battery. Press and hold the Reset
button on the back of the machine for about 45 seconds. Plug the AC
adaptor back in, but don't put in the battery. Press the Reset button
again and the PowerBook should startup after a brief pause.

You can also purge the Power Manager by removing all power (AC adaptor
and battery) and the internal backup battery (it's a little round thing,
and lies next to the expansion bay) for a minute. When you put it all
back together the Power Manager will reload its code from the System
software.

Resetting the PRAM will also reset the Power Manager.

POWERBOOK 1400, 2400, 3400 & POWERBOOK G3 (M3553)

Turn the computer off, then restart by holding down the reset key (at
the rear) for 10-20 seconds. If this doesn't restart the machine, try
again two or three times.

Resetting the PRAM will also reset the Power Manager.

POWERBOOK G3 SERIES (M4753)

Turn the computer off, then press Shift-Fn-Control-Power. Wait five
seconds, then press Power to turn the machine on.

Resetting the PRAM will also reset the Power Manager

POWERBOOK G3 SERIES (BRONZE KEYBOARD) (M5343)

Turn the computer off, press the reset button at the rear, and turn it
on again using the Power button.

Resetting the PRAM will also reset the Power Manager.

7.2. Hardware repairs and troubleshooting 7.2.1. Desktop Macs

GETTING INSIDE

Getting inside some desktop Macs is a fairly obvious process. Some are a
little more difficult.

COMPACT MACS

The early all-in-one Macs (from the 128 to the Classics) require a
long-handled Torx-10 screwdriver. There are 2 screws at the bottom, and
two in the recess for the handle. If the Mac has a battery compartment
at the back, there is a fifth battery in there. Once all the batteries
are out, the back of the case must be removed. On some machines -
particularly the 128, 512 and the Plus, and if they have never been
opened before - it's rather stiff. Don't use anything like a screwdriver
to lever them apart, because you'll just damage the case. The jaws of a
bulldog clip, inserted in the gap and then spread open can help loosen
it. Also try pressing in on the power socket at the back. Eventually the
whole rear casing can be slid off backwards, revealing all.

POWER MACINTOSH 4400 4400

Undo the screws on the back which hold the top metal cover to the
chassis. Slide the top metal cover off backwards (it's very stiff) a
little, then lift it off. You may need to encourage it with a
screwdrive. To get further in, remove the metal bar running
front-to-back. Remove the HDD assembly (it pulls straight up). Then
remove the CD/floppy chassis, by sliding backwards and levering up.
You'll have removed one or two more (fairly obvious) screws by the time
you've done this. The rest is easy. Refitting is the reverse of this
process, except you'll spend ages trying to get the CD/floppy chassis
into exactly the right position.

7.2.2. PowerBooks

POWERBOOK100-SERIES HARDWARE REPAIRS

OPENING IT

You need a Torx T-8 screwdriver and a T-10. Unplug the machine and
remove the battery. Remove the screw from the back of the case *first*
(important! everybody forgets this one and damages the case), then the
four on the bottom.

Turn the machine the right way up. Gently lift up the top at the back.
There is a flat grey cable holding the top and bottom together. If you
can, reach in and unplug it from the socket on the bottom half. Treat it
as gently as you can; it's very delicate and is possibly already
damaged. Unhook the two tabs at the front of the case. Do all this with
great patience. Spend a lot of time studying it before pulling at
things. When you've done that you can lift the top off cleanly.

REMOVING THE SCREEN

Note: for the most common 100-series display problems (see below) you
don't need to remove the screen.

Remove the two rubber plugs at the bottom edge of the screen frame, and
then the screws behind them. Make sure you support the screen underneath
when you do this, in order to relieve the strain on the remaining two
screws (which are behind the panel).

Ease off the front panel carefully. There are clips along the edges.
Carefully unplug the backlight cable (two wires). On the active matrix
screens, the flat screen cable connects at the bottom. If your screen is
the passive type the cable connects at the right hand side. Unplug it
from the screen, then undo the four Torx screws holding it to the back
panel.

REPAIRING SCREEN PROBLEMS

Almost every PowerBook in the 100-series (except the PB 100 itself, to
which this information does not apply) we have dealt with which required
attention has had a damaged or unseated interconnect board cable.

The symptoms can include, but are probably not limited to: nothing
happening at all, no sound, poor sound, the microphone not working,
random crashes, keys not working, random shutdowns, nothing on the
screen, lines missing on the screen, a mess on the screen, the backlight
not working, the backlight working intermittently. (The only PowerBook
1xx which had something different wrong with it had been completely
fried - the motherboard fuse had blown and the logic board was ruined.

You may find that opening the machine and putting it back together again
solves the problem, since it involves unplugging and re-inserting the
interconnect cable. However, you may need to take more drastic action.
Read on.

The logic board is the one the grey cable plugs into. Except in the
PowerBook 150, underneath it is the main board (interchangeable with
other machines in the series). In the top case is the interconnect board
(where the grey cable comes from) and next to it the inverter board
which generates 450V for the backlighter. Do try to avoid touching this
latter carelessly when it's turned on, unless you are turned on by a
sharp buzz.

It's that grey cable which tends to fail. Sometimes they are mistreated,
and sometimes they just get tired of life. Sometimes they just work a
bit loose, which hopefully is what's the case with yours.

So: carefully reassemble the machine. Take even more care than before,
because you don't want to strain the cable or damage the delicate pins
in the socket. Make sure the cable is properly seated (*carefully* press
down on either side of the black plastic cable header using a pair of
screwdrivers through the holes in the back of the casing. A helping hand
is very useful here). You want to make sure that the cable folds towards
the *front* of the machine, not the back - it is very easily damaged
otherwise. Lower the top case into position, but before clipping it back
try plugging in the power and seeing how it looks. If everything works,
on tip-toe and without daring to breathe, press the case together and
get those screws in without further ado. Breathe again. If it's still
working, you have probably fixed it.

If not, try again. If a couple more tries elicit no improvement, the
cable may be damaged. They usually seem to break internally near the
interconnect board end. I have successfully repaired a number of them,
but the process is extremely fiddly, not guaranteed to work and - if
you're not careful - physically and emotionally painful.

The cable may not be the problem. However, in all the PowerBooks I have
repaired, with just one exception, it was. If you can't solve the
problem by re-inserting the cable and you can't or don't want to get a
replacement interconnect board, you can try to repair the cable. I have
done this successfully several times, on each occasion to my amazement.

REPAIRING THE INTERCONNECT CABLE

First, remove the thin screen and keyboard cables carefully (actually,
they're tougher than they look) from the board. Remove the little
inverter board. Remove the interconnect board (the one with the grey
cable attached to it).

Now, study it, draw pictures of it, and note the orientation of plugs
and cables and cable headers. Dismantle - or more realistically, prise
apart causing some inevitable but hopefully minimal damage - the header
(which plugs into the logic board) at the end of the grey cable.
Carefully, so you don't stretch it widthways, peel the cable off the 80
or so little pins.

In my experience the cables are often damaged internally just near where
they exit the header. The brave bit: using a pair of sharp scissors,
remove about 1.2cm from the grey cable. Cut as straight as possible.
Inspect the ends for possible shorts.

Place the cable back in the header, carefully aligned, put the flat bit
on top of the cable, and try to reassemble it. The tiny pins on the
header must cut through the plastic and grip the wires in the cable,
just one pin to each wire. You need something like a strong vice. A
heavy hammer wielded carefully will do in a pinch.

Reassemble the machine and see what happens.

A note: on one machine I had to trim the damaged cable at *both* header
and board ends. The cable ended up very short, but it was just long
enough and the machine worked perfectly.

POWERBOOK DUO

OPENING A POWERBOOK DUO

Unplug and remove the keyboard. It's held in by three Torx screws
underneath. Carefully prise up the two cable clamps, and remove the
cables.

Either side of the screen at the bottom are two rounded caps covering
the hinges. They slide off, outwards. They also make your fingernails
slide off. Don't use a screwdriver, or you'll damage them, and don't try
to prise them up except to loosen them a bit (prise them up on the
inside edge).

Remove the battery, and you'll see how to detach the lower and upper
parts of the case quite easily. Locking tabs hold them together. On the
other side (where the hard disc is) it's much less flexible. To unlock
the tabs, the top part has to be slid towards you, so you need to pull
up on the top part at the back (under the end caps which covered the
hinges) to allow this. A certain amount of flexion is required of the
top cover, but be gentle with the tabs.

POWERBOOK 190/5300

INTRODUCTION

The PowerBooks 5300 and 190 were launched in August 1995, and
represented both the 68k and the PowerPC lines in one design. The
PowerBook 5300 really got off to a bad start. The first PowerPC portable
should have been a resounding success, but it featured plastics that
crumbled, hinges that cracked, sockets which broke and batteries which
caught fire. The first two problems were acknowledged by Apple, and can
still be dealt with free-of-charge under a Repair Extension programme.
The batteries were swiftly dealt with (by Sony, who were responsible for
that particular embarrassment). Unfortunately Apple do not seem to
consider the problems with the sockets to be their responsibility,
though they can be repaired without too much trouble.

OPENING THE CASE

Remove the keyboard (unscrew the Torx screws on the bottom of the case,
lift it out at the front, and carefully prise up the cable clamps). This
will offer access to the RAM slot. To get further in, prise out the
shoulders below the screen at either side. Now the screen can be
removed; after gently lifting up the screen connector which plugs into
the circuit-board at the left-hand-side, remove the Torx screws on the
hinges. To obtain access to the hard disk drive, lift off the palm-rest
at the front of the machine (a little gentle pressing may be required to
release it from the locking tabs. Be gentle, because the trackpad cable
needs to be released from the board (lift up the little clamp to do
this). The hard disk drive lives under a protective cage with the power
management unit. Undo the Torx screws to lift up the cage. The drive can
then be unscrewed from the cage.

SERIAL/MOUSE/KEYBOARD/CHARGER PORT PROBLEMS

Unfortunately, the sockets at the rear of the board on this machine are
prone to damage. They are soldered to the board. Any movement of cables
plugged into any of the sockets puts a strain on the joints, which all
too often decide to let go. It is easy enough to repair them, however,
with a steady hand, patience and a fine-tipped soldering iron.

After removing the keyboard, remove the left hand shoulder below the
screen, so that you can reach the sockets - you may with luck be able to
resolder the pins without further dismantling. More likely though you
will have to dismantle the PowerBook more completely to do it, but this
is probably the best thing to do anyway as you'll be able to get at the
pins much more easily.

7.2.3. Mice

MY APPLE ADB MOUSE II WON'T CLICK (Devi Jankowicz)

Remove the serial number sticker from the underside of the mouse. This
covers a hole at the bottom of which lies a cruciform-headed screw which
you unscrew with a thin screwdriver, allowing you to separate top and
bottom of the mouse. The switch that goes "click" when you depress the
mouse button is in fact part of a sealed unit. It sticks out about 2 mm
above the top of a 0.5 x 1 cm little plastic block thingy, and you can't
adjust the travel on the switch directly. However, the whole plastic
block sits loosely on two vertical pins. All you have to do is to slip a
piece of thin card (say 1 mm thick by 3 mm by 5 mm) under one side of
the plastic block, and a slightly shorter piece of thin card under the
other side, thus raising the whole block by the thickness of the card.
This lifts the whole mouse button a wee bit and restores the travel.

While you're in there, take the opportunity to blow out all the crud
that's dropped inside from when you last cleaned the rollers by removing
the mouse-ball.

7.2.4. Modems

LINE QUALITY

If you are having difficulties in obtaining or maintaining a connection
to a remote server, there may be a problem with the quality of the
telephone connection between your modem and the one at the other end.

Open up your usual terminal emulator program (the Communications module
of ClarisWorks will do the job perfectly well) and use it it to dial up
the number you usually use.

Once you're connected - when you start getting logon messages from the
server - type +++ to put the modem into command mode (that means that
the modem will take what you type to be an instruction to it, and not a
keypress to relay to the remote server). The modem should respond with
an OK. Now type AT&V1, and press Return. The modem will return a lot of
communications data, amongst which there should be one indicating line
quality (represented by a number). The lower the number the better, and
it should be less than 26.

TechTool Pro 2 also has some line quality/level testing features.

8. Life in a PC world

WHY CHOOSE MACINTOSH? [Daniele Procida]

This is a true story. I once knew two brothers who decided to buy
computers. After much careful consideration, one bought a Mac and the
other bought a PC. Nothing really much happened to the one who bought a
Mac; he just bought it, set it up, and started using it for his work.
All pretty unspectacular; it didn't change his life though it made
certain tasks much much easier, which is exactly what he wanted a
computer for in the first place.

His brother was pleased because he thought he'd saved an awful lot of
money by going for a PC instead of a Mac. But after a month or so,
things started going badly. Firstly, he was a keen and accomplished -
and very striking - amateur painter. He began to notice that his
painting was getting drab and derivative. He had a fine record
collection, full of Stravinsky and Bartok gems, not to mention his
beloved Galaxie 500 and Chills albums and singles, but one day when he
went to seek solace there he discovered that all he had were dozens of
volumes of "Classic Moods" compilations and Best Of collections of the
likes of Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. His daughters took up
smoking. For some reason, he could no longer buy clothes that fitted him
properly. He used to love reading, but whereas he used to go out on
Saturdays and spend hours in the library at the bookshelves -
Hemmingway, Genet, Brecht, Chandler, James Joyce - he now only ever came
home carrying computer magazines with garish covers. The final straw was
that he discovered his 17" monitor - so much cheaper than his brother's
Apple model - was badly adjusted and affecting the polarity of his teeth
with very unpleasant consequences. Shortly after that - fortunately, I
think I should say - his PC suffered motherboard failure just when the
warranty had expired, and he never bothered to get it repaired or
replaced. I can honestly say that after that things immediately started
to improve for him, especially his teeth.

Get a Mac.

EXCHANGING DATA WITH NON-MAC USERS [Peter Ceresole]

Exchanging data with PeeCee users (Unix users too, if it comes to that)
is an important feature in a Mac user's life. It also ought to be easy,
but seems to cause trouble.

VIA FLOPPY DISK

System versions from 7.1 onwards came equipped with PC Exchange. This is
a Control Panel and enables Macs to read from, write to and format PC
floppy disks, just as though they were Mac disks. System 7 versions
won't handle Windows 95 long file names, although it truncates them in a
reasonable way. The System 7 PC Exchange can simply be added to any
version of System 7, even those that didn't come with it originally, and
it works fine.

MacOS 8.1 onwards has a version that handles PC long filenames but can't
be run under System 7.

MacOS 8.5.1 has a bug that won't let it work with Double Density (720k)
floppies. On an iMac, just inserting the floppy crashes the machine so
it's best to check first (double density floppies have only one square
hole at the base, high density floppies have two). This bug still isn't
fixed in MacOS 8.6. Hell's bells.

VIA EMAIL

Macs have no trouble receiving any form of attachment from a PC, but
it's not so easy the other way. Plain text is always simple as it will
pass through the Net unmangled. However, binaries containing 8-bit
characters can't be guaranteed a safe passage; the top bit may well be
stripped off, corrupting the file beyond recovery. Binary files include
Stuffit or CompactPro or (best for PC owners) Zip archives. And files
from such applications as Word, Filemaker Pro or Excel, and all graphics
and sound files, are also binaries.

Such files have to be encoded to reduce them to 7-bit characters (like
text files) and decoded at the receiving end. This is often done
automatically; for instance if you are using Eudora on your Mac and the
PC owner is using Outlook Express, both these applications understand
the Mime encoding system, and will automatically handle attachments sent
between them. However, Mac to Mac transfers use an encoding called
'Bin-Hex', which retains the Mac system information contained in the
'resource fork' of the Mac file. PCs can't use this information; to send
a file to a PC user, if you have the choice, use 'AppleDouble' encoding
which sends files in a way PCs can understand.

If you are still having trouble (there are some fairly dumb mail
programs out there still) then use UUEncoding, which produces a text
file which can be sent in the body of the text and decoded on any system
(even CP/M!) with shareware or freeware applications. Just in case you
get one, the start of a UUEncoded file looks like this:

begin 666 modem help 1.jpg M_]C_X `02D9)1@`!`0(`)0`E``#_VP!#``4#!
0$`P4$! 0%!04&!PP(!P<'
M!P\+"PD,$0\2$A$/$1$3%AP7$Q0:%1$1&"$8&AT='Q\?$Q<B)"(>)!P>'Q[_
MVP!#`04%!0<&!PX(" X>%!$4'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>
M'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'AX>'A[_P `1" )8`R #`2(``A$!`Q$!_\0`

And so on into the sunset. All the lines are the same length, all begin
with a capital 'M'.

Once you've found a method that works with a particular correspondent,
just stick to it like glue.

9. Non-Mac friends for your Mac

PSION 3 SERIES [Andrew Fraser]

The Psion 3 series can be connected to most Macs running System 7.0 and
above and with more than 4Mb of RAM. The connection will allow back-up
of the Psion's data, transfer of text or spreadsheet files and the
installation of files or programs from the internet or floppy disc to
the Psion.

The connection is via a MacLink cable which connects to the printer or
modem port on your Mac and an RS232 port on the Psion. Users of USB
equipped Macs are not currently supported, though use of adaptors may
allow connection. The software (PsiMac) currently costs around £70 (with
connection cable) and is supplied on three floppy discs. There are
however usually some good deals on the connection package through the
Psion classified sites or the Psion newsgroups with prices of £20 - £25
fairly common.

In use the Psion - Mac connection is straightforward, supporting Drag
and Drop, though it lacks many features - there is no easy diary/agenda
type synchronisation such as offered with the PalmPilot products, and
database transfer is not supported. There are work-around solutions if
transfering adatabase or diary is required but these could not be
considered as either easy (initially) or feasible for day-to-day use. In
fact the Mac connectivity falls significantly behind the connection
suite available to Windows users but a version of this, PsiWin 2.1, can
be downloaded free from the Psion web site and can be successfully used
through the Softwindows 95 package on a Mac with a connection lead
available separately from a specialist lead company at about £15.

While the Psion 3 series has been largely superseded by the series 5,
and newer 5mx, there is still a place for this excellent little machine
and plenty of reasonably priced second hand Psion 3s available.

Further information can be found on the Web at:

http://www.psion.co.uk - Psion's official site
http://www.3-lib.ukonline.co.uk - an excellent Psion resource site
(includes classified ads) http://www.psionleads.freeserve.co.uk -
suppliers of many Psion connection leads

And on Usenet:

comp.sys.psion.misc - the main Psion discussion group
comp.sys.psion.marketplace - for used Psions and Psion-related bits &
bobs

10. Macintosh resources 10.1. Books

THE MACINTOSH BIBLE

Sharon Zardetto Aker, Peachpit Press, ISBN 0-201-87483-0, £27, $34.99

Now into its 7th edition, and over 1000 pages long, this ought to be the
book for Mac users. In some of its earlier incarnations, the 3rd, 4th
and 5th editions, it was. That's no longer the case. Previously it was
co-written by a team of writers and editors, and reading it felt like
listening to a series of conversations about the Mac. The authors
disagreed with one another on all kinds of issues - small keyboards or
large? is Microsoft Word any good? should mice have more than one
button? - and argued out their ideas and opinions with each other on the
page. This was not only hugely entertaining, but also informative.

Now the Mac Bible is in the hands of just one author, and it is clearly
far too much for just one person to manage. The lively style has gone,
as have the discussions, to be replaced with much less gripping lists of
facts and procedures. There are also an annoyingly large number of
errors, misprints and other mistakes. Still, I have a copy, and though
it's by no means indispensable, it probably is worth the asking price.

10.2. Periodicals

MacUser is the most reliable of the three UK Mac periodicals. Since it
appears fortnightly rather than monthly, it is also able to keep more
up-to-date with news. And though nobody reads a computer magazine
because they love good writing, MacUser does seem to achieve a higher
standard than most. It even boasts Charles Shaar Murray as a columnist.

MacFormat is solidly aimed at the home user, though it insists on
spending much time reviewing items which no home user except a
millionaire would ever dream of using, never mind owning at home. An
experienced Mac user is unlikely to learn much new in MacFormat, but
since it offers a lot of moderately basic advice and information a
year's subscription would be extremely useful to most beginners.

MacWorld is a fairly unsatisfactory magazine. Most of its writing is in
an irritatingly jocular tone, its news is always late, its facts often
wrong, and its columnists amazingly ill-informed. I wouldn't trust it at
all.

Both MacFormat and MacWorld have cover CDs containing shareware,
software updates and demonstration programs. Both could be better
formatted and arranged, and the software on them could certainly be
better chosen. Sometimes they offer free versions of a
commercially-available program that has just been superceded by a newer
version, which is a cheap way of building up a perfectly useful software
library.

END OF FAQ