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Readers' Tips
If you have a tip or found something helpful in your own adventures with the mac, please drop Macshare a line.
Having trouble downloading from ftp and gopher sites with Netscape? Can't even
get in the front door due to bandwidth? While you might not like the interface of
TurboGopher or
Anarchie
quite as well, you may find either of these will help you get in and also give you
better throughput as well. Try using
Netscape to find the site location, then use Anarchie or TurboGopher to do the
actual download. The Symantec ftp site for virus updates, for example, is especially
difficult during peak hours to get into with Netscape. You might also run some side
by side tests at ftp and gopher sites with especially large graphics files. I've
been getting improved throughput with TurboGopher, with Anarchie just behind, an
important consideration when you're downloading 40 meg or larger files.
The following hints are based on my experience with Netscape 2.0 and
on reports fromvisitors, but your mileage may vary.
If you use the Netscape browser, you might need to Option-click (on Macs) or
Shift-click (under X/Windows) on the links to Mac files instead of merely clicking.
If you just click, your Netscape browser will try to convert the file to MacBinary
format and will deliver a corrupted file (this seems to be yet another bug in Netscape).
If you hold down the modifier key while clicking, conversion will be disabled and
you will obtain the file in BinHex format. You will then need to drop onto StuffIt
Expander to decode and decompress it.
If, when you click on one of the links above to download a program, your browser
displays a text screen full of gibberish, don't worry. This is because the files
have been saved in BinHex format in order to be transmitted safely across the net.
You should save this text as a text file, and then run the resulting file through
StuffIt Expander which will decode and decompress it.
I have had numerous problems with my Performa 575 that the good folks at 1-800-SOS-APPL
gave me some pretty bad advice on. After downloading some new software, expanding it,
and launching it, I had a serious problem on restart. I would get about four
extensions items to load before I got a flickering blank window and eventual lock-up.
The system would load with extensions off. Apple had me do all the usual - rebuild the
desktop, zap the PRAM - but to no avail. The next instruction was to rename the system
folder, trash the finder and reload the system software off the Performa CD. That
didn't work either. They then instructed me to initialize (erase) the hard drive and
start over. I did and I'm sorry I did. What a pain. It took me forever to reload
everything I lost.
I later learned in an issue of MacWorld that the problem was caused by a corrupt
finder preference file. All I had to do was trash it and let the system build a new
one and my flickering window would have been gone. Apparently, similar problems can be
caused by a corrupt Apple Menu Options file. Same solution. Remember these two...
Many people have complained about the fact that the Mac OS 8 installer just installs everything without giving the user the ability to choose what is installed. Well this isn't so! When the install is complete, just click the "Continue" button. When the installer window is displayed again, click the back "<" button until you're back at the drive selection page. Now click the forward ">" button. A dialog will tell you that Mac OS 8 is already installed, and presents a "Revise/Change" button. Clicking this will let you do all the customizing you want!
by Francois Pottier, author of DiskWizard
by John Erickson
by Anthony D. Saxton
LnA Concepts
