Graphics tablet

Which graphics tablet would you recommend for use with my PowerBook G3 (FireWire)? I don’t need to do a lot of sketching and something portable would be ideal.

Rich Reis

Your best bet would be Wacom’s delightful little Graphire Mouse and Pen set, a USB tablet, which is readily available even from high-street retailers. This has a slimline 20cm x 23cm (external dimensions) tablet and stylus, plus a cordless mouse to use with it. The stylus has configurable support for drawing and painting operations, including bundled Photoshop plug-ins, while the two-button mouse can be customised and has a third button/scrollwheel. You also get a free OEM copy of Corel Painter Classic. Wacom’s USB drivers seem quite stable ­ an important consideration when choosing USB input devices ­ but you may experience strange corruption problems if you use it with Microsoft Word 98 (a known issue at present).

Monitor problems

About once a week the image on my Apple Studio Display 17in monitor shudders, makes a ’static’ sound, fades down to 50% black and shrinks. Immediately, the image starts to re-appear normally again, as if the monitor has been powered back on. Why is this? Is the monitor about to pack up?

This behaviour has been seen on a number of Apple’s blue-and-white 17in Studio Displays, and appears to be a periodic automatic de-gaussing sequence. De-gaussing is a process of neutralising the magnetic fields which build up during monitor use, and which could otherwise lead to image distortion. Many good monitors handle this automatically, although older ones sometimes offer a button to perform it manually. Thankfully, LCD monitors are immune to this problem.

The alternative is a power or power-supply problem. Check all the leads are securely connected, and that none appears damaged. Some years ago, one of the main manufacturers of power cables shipped some defective batches; these should have been long since recalled, but it may be worth checking that the power lead is good. If that’s the case, the only other alternative is that the power supply is starting to fail, in which case you would expect to see the behaviour becoming more frequent, if so, take the monitor to your dealer. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to open the monitor up yourself: cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors contain very high voltages which can be retained for many hours or days after the monitor was last used. Such voltages will kill.

SyQuest EZflyer cartridges

Where in the UK can I buy SyQuest cartridges for the EZflyer 230?

Jan Melichar

SyQuest removable hard disks essentially consist of a cartridge containing the platter ­ that is, the disk itself. Although an attractive idea, it proved quite fragile in practice, particularly when disks and drives were exposed to dust. SyQuest was bought up by its rival, Iomega, which continues to offer limited support, including supplies of some older products, such as disk cartridges. As such, you may be able to obtain your cartridges from www.iomega.com. However, given the poor track record of SyQuest drives and their uncertain future support, you should look to replace your old drive as a matter of urgency. Iomega Zip and Jaz drives are very popular and cheap, but also have some problems with reliability. CD-R has gained widespread acceptance as a good way of providing cheap near-permanent archiving facilities, and may well prove the most suitable for you.

Internet Explorer, Outlook Express

How can I stop Microsoft Internet Explorer from making that dreadful squeaking sound and displaying help balloons? Why does it (and Outlook Express) sometimes take as long as 10 minutes to start up after a crash?

Internet Explorer (IE) uses its own help balloon system, ToolTips, which isn’t affected by turning off regular Balloon Help. To get rid of those tedious squeaking balloons, open the Preferences settings and uncheck the option labelled Show ToolTips in the Browser Display pane.

Both IE and Outlook Express may need to rebuild their internal database files following a crash, particularly if they were active at the time of the crash. This may take time, although 10 minutes does seem excessive. You should ensure your disk is healthy (using Disk First Aid and your chosen third-party tool), and optimise the directory data using DiskWarrior.

Your crashes may result from an extension conflict, which you can isolate and treat using Extensions Manager or Conflict Catcher. Another common cause of instability in IE is Java: some users find MRJ 2.2.3 results in crashes, others that 2.2.2 is no better, so you may need to revert to 2.2.1.

Quark XPress printing problems

QuarkXPress 4.0 (running on a Power Mac G3) regularly fails to print jobs with complex paths created in Photoshop 5.5, returning a PostScript error. However, if I save the file down to QuarkXPress 3.3 and print it from our Power Mac 9600, it’s fine. How can I get these files to print properly first time?

Sarah

This appears to be a common problem when working with more recent versions of QuarkXPress. You should make sure you’ve upgraded to the latest release, and that your printer has ample memory ­ PostScript errors are frequently caused by insufficient working memory for the PostScript interpreter. Because PostScript is a stack-based interpreted language, it’s prone to overflow memory in an unpredictable way, then returns a spurious error condition.

It’s also important to select the right printer settings and options. If none of these measures brings any relief, then your current makeshift, of moving the document back into an older version of XPress, is likely to be your only workaround until Quark and/or Adobe rectifies the problem. If it’s any consolation, other XPress users are having to do the same.

Epson USB printer

My beige G3 300 has an Orange Micro combined FireWire and USB card. This works fine with a 20Gb FireWire hard disk and an ISDN card, but printing to an Epson 870 either requires a restart or causes a crash. I have all the latest drivers, including Apple USB Extensions for PCI USB cards, but the problem persists. How can I fix it?

William Allbrook

Until Epson provides a driver for the 870 which is more robust on older hardware such as beige G3 and iMac Rev A models, you may find it best to replace your printer. Tests on older iMacs suggest that Hewlett-Packard printer drivers are more robust, and would be more compatible with your hardware.

It’s difficult to know exactly where the underlying problem is: some technical commentators claim there are hardware timing issues with these older models and their USB implementation, which may never be fixed properly. However, USB is proving to be generally messier than, say, FireWire as a bus for connecting peripheral devices. It’s conceivable that future updates in the Epson 870 printer driver and in Apple support will resolve the conflicts, but you may not wish to gamble on that.

Budget graphics tools

Can you recommend an inexpensive application to facilitate drawing organisational diagrams, flowcharts and so on?

Sue Priestland

It’s perfectly possible to construct flowcharts and so on using even the basic graphics facilities offered in AppleWorks 6. However, AppleWorks’ tools aren’t ideal for such work. Microsoft Office also provides tools, particularly for organisational charting, in PowerPoint.

Odessa’s ConceptDraw is a modestly priced drawing application with excellent support for different types of diagrams, including organisational charts, flowcharts, and much more. It can hog memory though. You can find it at from www.conceptdraw.com. Alternatively, try the surprisingly sophisticated ShareDraw, at www.peircesw.com.There’s also an excellent new charting tool out, currently a plug-in for Illustrator, called Opular Charts, found at www.digitaltoolbox.co.uk, which can handle all this and more. It’s only £89, but you need Illustrator to be able to use it, which could make the total cost a little high.

iMac and iBook servicing

I’m interested in buying an iMac or iBook, but I have been told that they are much more difficult to fix if they go wrong. Is that true?

Jess Smith

As with most bits of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), there’s a small grain of truth in what you’ve been told. All-in-one computers such as iMacs, iBooks and PowerBooks are harder to service and repair than those with more spacious internals, such as Power Macs. But Apple service engineers are trained to cope with all models in the Apple product range, and this should only be a significant concern if you’re likely to have to perform your own service and repair ­ for example, if you’re going to be isolated and a long way from your nearest engineer. The latest iMacs are particularly convenient to upgrade with extra memory and an AirPort card, and iBooks are straightforward, too.

Internet Explorer bundling

We need to include a copy of Internet Explorer on a CD-ROM to allow the user to browse Web sites from the disk. Microsoft won’t reply to our requests. Are there any licensing issues?

Paul Batey

This is something Microsoft is likely to agree to, but, yes, you must obtain a proper redistribution licence before you commit to distributing any commercial software of this type, even if it’s normally provided free of charge. Failing to do so will be treated as a serious matter, and could land you in court at the wrong end of Microsoft’s lawyers.

Rather than sending emails, which are readily ignored by the recipient, why not try phoning Microsoft to establish the correct person to whom the request should be directed? If that fails, try Netscape.

Old Mac server

We want to buy a G4 to replace a Power Mac 6500 (with a Newer Technology G3 upgrade). Could we use the 6500, without a monitor, as a scanner server for our Linotype Hell Saphir Ultra 2 scanner, to save risking a SCSI card in the new G4?

Matt Ross

There’s no reason why you couldn’t do this, although it’s hard to see how you would, short of setting up a full OPI system. There are software products which allow you to share scanners over a network, but these wouldn’t really make much use of the 6500 as a ‘server’, just as a large SCSI card. You would then risk clogging up your network during high-resolution scans, and may quickly become disenchanted with the whole concept. You would also find it hard to operate the 6500 without a monitor.

Rather than re-deploying it as a ‘scanner server’, wouldn’t the 6500 be better as a file server and/or central backup station, particularly if equipped with a large hard drive or three?

You also imply that you might consider using the monitor from the 6500 with your new G4. Be careful here, as the latest G4 models are designed to work best with Apple’s new monitors, and their new ADC. While adaptors are becoming available (and the G4 models have standard VGA connectors), you would probably do best buying a new monitor to match the G4.

File sharing in Mac OS 8.6

I have a desktop G3 running Mac OS 8.6, and a PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.0.4. When I use file sharing to move files between them, the control panel may hang, or either machine crashes when trying to disconnect. Is this a known problem, and how can I fix it?

Barry Margham

Although this hasn’t been widely reported, some combinations of systems such as yours can result in bizarre problems when trying to share files. Ideally, you should update the AppleShare extension in Mac OS 8.6 to that in 9.0.4, but you may also need to update the whole of Open Transport. The simplest route might be just to move both machines up to 9.0.4. If you can’t do that, try a clean install of Mac OS 8.6 on your desktop machine, and see whether the problem persists.

You might also find it helpful to perform a clean re-install of 9.0.4 on the PowerBook, in case that has become damaged. When trying to connect, don’t do so as a guest, but as a recognised user, complete with password. Temporary glitches with file sharing can sometimes be fixed by throwing away Users & Groups and File Sharing files from the Preferences folder, and rebuilding them using their control panels. Corrupt preferences files are a frequent cause of crashes and similar problems.

If all else fails, and your machines have FireWire ports, you may find it easier to mount the PowerBook as a FireWire disk on the desktop. To do this, connect the machines by FireWire ports using a regular FireWire cable. With the PowerBook connected to mains power, start it up while holding down the t-key. It should then appear as another mounted volume on your Desktop.