Macintosh Easy Open Setup

If there’s one thing that frustrates novices and old Mac salts alike, it’s seeing that infernal “Application not found” message when you double-click an icon. Apple has made various attempts to rectify the situation: allowing you to drag a file onto its program’s icon, displaying messages that offer to open text and PICT files in SimpleText, and so on. All these solutions have one flaw in common, however: they all assume that you know what kinds of programs can read the mysterious icon you’re trying to open.

That’s why Apple came up with Macintosh Easy Open. (It comes free with System 7.5.) With this control panel installed, when you double-click an icon, you don’t get an error message — you get a dialog box that lists the programs you own that can open the mystery file .

Alas, Macintosh Easy Open has its drawbacks. One problem is that it relies on software companies to make their own programs compatible with Easy Open — to make known, in other words, what file formats they’re capable of opening — and not all software companies have bothered. Another problem is that Easy Open requires, at all times, an up-to-date index of every program you own (so that its list of alternative programs will be accurate). That requirement leads to a lot of extra desktop-rebuilding, as explained in the “Desktop under permanent construction” sidebar.

                    Desktop under permanent construction

Q: What the heck is going on? My Mac sometimes rebuilds its own Desktop, unbidden. I’m not pressing any keys; I’m not doing anything — except waiting and waiting for it to finish. What’s going on?

A: Calm down. You’ve got Macintosh Easy Open, right?

Q: How’d you know?

A: Macintosh Easy Open’s job is to suggest programs to open the mystery document you’re double-clicking, right? As a result, it has to know what programs you have.

The trouble occurs when you start up the Mac with the Shift key down, thus turning off all extensions, including Easy Open. The next time you start up, Easy Open worries that, while it was turned off, you might have added or removed programs behind its back. It therefore insists on rescanning your disk — by rebuilding the desktop — to make sure that its index of your programs is current.

MacLink Plus Setup

MacLink Plus, a useful utility included with System 7.5, is designed primarily to open DOS or Windows files when you double-click them, translating them into a Macintosh format. You use this control panel to configure MacLink Plus’s translators.

MacTCP

This control panel lets you configure your Mac for connections to the Internet (via so-called PPP and SLIP services) and other networks (such as TCP/IP-based Ethernet systems, if you know what they are). If you’re not on a network and don’t use the Internet, throw this out. See Chapter 28 for more on the Internet.

Map

If you need to know the exact time in Ulan Bator (a city in northern Mongolia), or if you’re called upon to calculate the mileage from there to your office, the Map control panel is indispensable. Generations of Mac fans have disparaged the Map — but it’s probably far more important than you suspect, as we’ll discuss shortly, and it certainly harbors more than its share of Secrets.

Click any spot on the world map, and the Map displays the current time at that locale, along with its precise longitude and latitude . You can scroll around the world by dragging the pointer to the edges of the map window.

The Find feature can locate specific cities, islands, and other points on the Map; just type the name of the city you want to locate and then click the Find button (or press Return). The Map already knows about most major cities, as well as Mount Everest and the Middle of Nowhere (a spot in the South Atlantic Ocean — try it by typing MID and pressing Return).

If you’re not sure that a city is listed or don’t know how to spell it, type just the first letter or letters and then click Find. The Map jumps to the nearest match.

To make practical use of the Map, you have to make sure that you’ve set your home city, which becomes the reference point from which all distances and times are measured. To do this, locate your city on the Map, using the Find command, and then click the Set button. Your city now becomes mile zero and displays the current time. The Map calculates all distances and time differences based on your home city’s location and time.

If your home isn’t among the cities listed in the Map, use an atlas to determine the exact latitude and longitude of your home. (Or if you’re not fussy, just click the approximate spot.) Use this information to add your city to the map: type the name of the city, along with its coordinates, and then click Add City.

Map Secrets

Around the world in 80 Returns
To see all the locations that the Map already knows about, hold down the Option key while repeatedly clicking Find (or pressing Return). This action cycles through all the cities that the Map is programmed to find by name.

No clock-resetting for the PowerBook traveler
If you have a PowerBook (or travel with your desktop Mac), reset the Map’s home city when you go on a trip. By resetting the map to your destination city, the time on the Mac’s internal clock automatically changes to match the time in the new city. This way, you don’t have to set your Mac clock at the end of each flight, and you’ll still be able to check the time in your home city.

The importance of setting your home town
Here’s solid proof that the Map can have a profound impact on your work: A major magazine publishing company in Oregon was struggling to keep its important QuarkXPress files up to date. An editor would open a nearly-completed magazine layout only to get a warning from QuarkXPress that nearly all the imported graphics in the Quark file had modified and needed updating. Yet, the editor knew perfectly well that the graphics had not been updated since the file was last saved. Still, not wanting to take chances, the editor would laboriously update each file. An hour later, though, the same thing would happen. It was driving the staff crazy. Why did Quark keep saying the pictures in the files had been modified when they weren’t?

Incredibly, the Map was responsible. One of the designers had unwittingly set his Map’s home city to Ouagadougou — the capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Even though his clock was set correctly, the Map was telling his Mac that it was really eight hours earlier in Oregon. Therefore, each file he saved was date-stamped with a time that was, by Oregon time, eight hours ahead of its actual save time. When the file was opened and saved on another Mac set to the correct time zone, Quark become hopelessly confused as to when the files had really been modified last. (Fact is, this same Quark problem can arise even when the Mac clocks on a network are out of sync by just an hour or two.) At any rate, simply resetting the Map brought all the Macs on the network back into sync and the problem vanished.

And that’s why you shouldn’t ignore your lowly Map.

Instant intercity distance readout
You can use the Map to quickly ascertain the distance between any two spots on Earth. Suppose that you live in Chicago but need to know the distance between Miami and Budapest. Easy: type Miami in the location field, click Find (or press Return), and then click Set. As far as the Map is concerned, you just changed your home city. Next, type Budapest in the location field and press Return. The Map jumps to Budapest, and you’ll have your answer: 5,330 miles.

Miles-to-kilometers calculator
The Map control panel contains an undocumented feature for converting miles to kilometers and vice versa. The distance between two map points is displayed in the lower-left corner of the Map window. If the distance is displayed in miles, click mi, and that number is instantly converted from miles to kilometers. Click the km text and the distance again is converted, this time to degrees. Click again to return to convert the figure back to miles.

Map zooming
You can view the map at three levels of magnification: normal size, twice normal size, and four times normal size.

Magnify the map by 200 percent by pressing the Shift key while opening the Map control panel. To do this, you need to first double-click the Map icon and then press the Shift key (an icon won’t open if you hold down the Shift key while double-clicking).

To magnify the map by 400 percent, hold down the Option key while opening the control panel.

For an even more magnified view, try opening the Map while pressing both the Option and Shift keys. (Again, you need to press Shift right after you double-click.)

A better Map
If you have a color or gray-scale Mac, you can replace the uninspiring black-and-white map in the Map control panel with the splendid color world map stored in the Scrapbook. To make the switch, copy the color map from the Scrapbook. Open the Map control Panel, click the map picture, and choose the Paste command.

You also can copy the map graphic from the Map control panel. Click anywhere on the map, and choose Copy. You now have a neat little world map that you can paste into any other program.

A new Map graphic
Actually, you can paste any graphic into the Map, although few choices other than a world map make any sense. Let Neil Diamond illustrate:

A multilingual Map
You won’t find this one anywhere but here. As we mentioned earlier, you can repeatedly press Option-Return to see every city in the Map’s database. If you continue past Zürich, the Map starts at the top of its list again — but this time, it tells you each city’s name in the native language spoken there!

What’s the time difference?
You can find out the difference between any spot in the world and your own time zone. First, click somewhere on the map (or type the city name, such as Paris, and click Find). Then click the words Time Zone. The Time Diff. box now shows the time difference between the cities. (The tiny + or – symbol at the right indicates whether you’re ahead or behind.)

The mystery of Lower Burrell
Even we are confounded by the presence of Lower Burrell, PA — population 13,200 — in the databases of both the Map and the Date & Time control panels. Yes, Lower Burrell...but not Pittsburgh!

Even stranger: Lower Burrell’s time zone seems to be an hour earlier than anywhere else in Pennsylvania. We suspect that it’s a programmer’s home town...but we’d love some knowledgeable reader to fill us in on the details.

Roll credits!
Click the version number at the right side of the control panel, and the words v7.0, by Mark Davis are inserted into the city-name field. The message disappears when you release the mouse button.

Memory

The Memory control panel  manages several important memory-related functions: the disk cache, virtual memory, RAM disks, Modern Memory Manager, and 32-bit addressing. For explanations of the real-world uses for these functions, see Chapter 9 (the memory chapter).

The Memory control panel automatically hides or shows controls, depending on your Mac model. For example, the original Mac LC doesn’t work with virtual memory, so no virtual-memory options appear. And only Power Macintosh models offer the Modern Memory Manager choice.

Memory control panel Secrets

Roll credits!
For this one, you need a Mac that works with virtual memory. First, turn on Virtual Memory. Hold down the Option key while clicking the pop-up menu used to choose a hard drive. Instead of a list of available drives, you see a hierarchical menu containing the names of the programmers. The submenus contain comments about each of the programmers.

Power Macintosh cleverness
If you own a Power Mac, use virtual memory. Everything you’ve ever been told about virtual memory is wrong, and virtual memory can save you hundreds of dollars’ worth of real RAM. See Chapter 9 for instructions and the lowdown.

Turn off virtual memory at startup
We’re not sure how often you’ll use this, but here it is: if you press the Command key while your Mac starts up, you’ll turn off virtual memory for that computing session.

Monitors

If your Mac’s monitor shows color or shades of gray, use the Monitors control panel to set the number of colors your monitor displays (for example, to switch from color to black and white). The range of options depends on your Mac’s video capability; the more video RAM, or VRAM, you have installed, the more colors your Mac can display. (Details on VRAM appear in Chapter 11.) The options range from two colors (black and white) to 16.7 million .

Why not always display the maximum number of colors possible? In a word: speed. Working with more colors slows a Mac’s display. So if you’re working on a large page layout, switch to black-and-white mode to speed screen redraws. As a general rule, the lower the color setting in the Monitors control panel (16 colors, 256, and so on), the faster your screen gets repainted.

(Some Power Mac models, of course, can’t be set to black-and-white; these Macs are considered fast enough that you wouldn’t notice any slowdown. See Chapter 13 for details. Speaking of which, some Power Mac models don’t even have this control panel; it’s been replaced in recent models by the new Sound & Displays control panel. See “Sound & Displays,” later in this chapter.)

You’re supposed to use the Monitors control panel to make the switch, selecting the number of colors you want to display. The long rectangle at the bottom of the control panel displays the full spectrum of colors you selected.

If you find that you change the number of colors displayed with some frequency, you may want to make an alias of the Monitors control panel. Put the alias in your Apple menu as a stand-alone item so that you can get to it more easily than through the Control Panels folder.

Or, for even faster switching, use Color Coordinator, included on the CD that come with this book (see Chapter 34).

Getting back to the Monitors control panel: you also use it to set up multiple monitor configurations if you have more than one monitor attached to your Mac. A common example: a PowerBook with a color monitor attached. The Monitors control panel, in this setup, determines which monitor — the laptop’s built-in screen or the external color — is considered to be the main screen.

Each monitor connected to your system is represented in the Monitors control panel by a tiny monitor icon. See Chapter 11 for a juicy exploration of multiple-monitors Secrets.

Monitor Secrets

Correcting the gamma
You make subtle adjustments to the color balance on your monitor by using an undocumented feature in the Monitors control panel. To unlock the feature, click the Options button while holding down the Option key. If you’re using your Mac’s built-in video or an Apple video card, you see a dialog box with a checkbox marked “Use Special Gamma.”

Apple monitors are manufactured by Sony. Apple found the overall image a little bit dim, however, and decided to adjust the gamma settings to create a brighter, whiter picture. Apple calls its preferred setting Standard Gamma. Uncorrected gamma, on the other hand, is the original, unmodified Sony Trinitron setting. Some Apple monitors, such as the Apple 16-inch monitor, offer additional gamma settings. Try each to see whether there’s a gamma setting that you prefer.

Be smart about your settings
For best speed and best picture, use the 256-colors settings for word processing, online services, and most day-to-day work. Definitely switch to “Thousands” if you’re going to be playing QuickTime movies, however. Reserve “Millions” for photo retouching.

Roll credits!
In the upper-right corner of the control-panel window, click the version number (such as 7.1.3). You see a pop-up list showing the names of the six programmers.

The fun isn’t over yet. Keep holding down the mouse button (so that the list stays visible), and press the Option key. The tiny face next to Jim Straus’s name sticks out its tongue each time you press the Option key. Press the Option key 11 times; the first and last names in the list begin to rearrange themselves and get replaced with the words Blue and Meanies. (The Blue Meanies are the System 7 test-and-cleanup SWAT team.)

Monitors & Sound

In System 7.5.3 (on PCI Power Macs), the Monitors control panel and the Sound control panel were replaced by one central multimedia control panel — called Monitors & Sound. It works exactly like the older Monitors control panel, with only two differences. First, two additional buttons at the top of the control panel let you switch its screen to show you sound controls. And second, all the functions of the Monitors control panel that used to be hidden away behind an Options button (such as Gamma and, for multisync monitors, resolution changing) are now easily accessible on the main panel. 

More important, Monitors & Sound adopts the 1996 look for new Apple control panels: light gray background and large icon buttons at the top (borrowed — oddly enough — from the Launcher window), and a Help button to click if you get confused.

Mouse

This control panel provides access to two vital mouse controls: tracking and double-click speed .

Mouse tracking is the ratio between the physical movement of the mouse on your desk and the movement of the pointer on your monitor. The higher the setting, the less you have to slide the mouse to move the pointer. In other words, at the fastest of the seven available settings, a tiny one-inch movement of the mouse on your desk may move the cursor three inches across the screen — or even more: the exaggeration of the cursor’s movement is associated with how fast you move the mouse.

Even at the fastest tracking setting, when you move the mouse very slowly, the cursor on the screen moves exactly that much — one inch per inch of desk space. (That makes life easier when you’re doing fine editing in a graphics program.) Yet if you move the mouse that same inch very quickly, the cursor on the screen may jump most of the way across your monitor. (Your cheerful authors once were privy to a thick Apple document — a bound dissertation on mouse-acceleration research, believe it or not — in which the pros and cons of various cursor-speed logarithmic scales were discussed and tested at length.)

The higher settings are best for most applications. You’re less likely to run out of mouse-pad (and desk space), and you can zip the pointer from one end of the monitor to the other with the flick of a wrist. We’ve heard it argued that the slower settings are good for graphics work, because a slow-moving pointer provides better control. Yet as we said, even at the Fast setting, a slow-moving mouse gives you a slow-moving cursor. (You can make the mouse even faster using ResEdit; see Chapter 21.)

How does the Mac know the difference between a double-click and two single clicks? Using the Mouse control panel’s Double-Click Speed setting, you tell the Mac how fast the two clicks must occur to qualify as a double-click. When adjusting this setting, watch the little picture of the mouse. The mouse button flashes to indicate the new minimum double-click rate.

In System 7.0 and System 7.0.1, the setting you make here also determines the amount of time you have to wait between (a) the time you click an icon’s name to change it and (b) the appearance of the renaming rectangle that actually allows you to begin typing (see “Renaming icons” in Chapter 1).

Network

The Mac, in its wondrous multilingual way, can talk to several different kinds of networks. It can talk to LocalTalk (the built-in networking system). It can talk to the faster, more expensive Ethernet or Token Ring. The Mac even can communicate with such a thing as a remote network, which is what you become when you use Apple Remote Access to dial in. (See Chapter 32 for details on networks.)

You have to use this control panel to direct the Mac’s attention to the correct kind of network. For example, if your Mac is hooked up to a laser printer by Ethernet, and you now want to connect your PowerBook 180 (which doesn’t have Ethernet) to transfer some files, you’ll have to switch the Mac to LocalTalk by opening Network and clicking the corresponding icon.

Numbers

This control panel first appeared in System 7.1. Like Date & Time, the Numbers control panel was necessitated by System 7.1’s “world-ready” feature.

This control panel determines where the commas and periods appear in big numbers. (In France, for example, periods are used instead of commas to separate the thousands, as in “you owe me a grand — yeah, 1.000 bucks.”) Use the little pop-up menus to change the punctuation to serve as the decimal point and the thousands separator , or simply type the punctuation mark in the box.

The right side of the control panel controls the way money amounts are displayed (such as what currency symbol appears).

Changing the Separators affects numbers in the Finder; a file that says “1,233K” will say “1.233K” after you restart the Mac. But we can’t think of anyplace where the Currency changes would have any effect. In any case, you probably can see where we’re headed with this: after you check out this control panel, throw it away.

Open Transport (and related files)

Open Transport, the 1995 universal networking software from Apple, introduces a bunch of clutter to your System folder: AppleTalk control panel, TCP/IP control panel, Open Tpt AppleTalk Library, Open Tpt Internet Library, Open Transport Library, OpenTptAppleTalkLib, OpenTptInternetLib, OpenTransportLib, Ethernet (built-in), Serial (built-in), AppleTalk Preferences, and TCP/IP Preferences. See Chapter 32 to find out what good all this does you.

PC Exchange

This handy control panel further breaks down the barriers between Macs and IBM-compatibles. With PC Exchange installed, you can, for the first time, insert a DOS disk into your Mac disk drive and see its icon on the Desktop, just like a Mac disk. And not just floppies — PC Exchange also lets DOS-formatted SyQuests, Bernoullis, and other removables appear on your desktop. (Apple is finally making good on its years-old marketing promise of providing a disk drive that can read both kinds of disks. Before PC Exchange, you had to run the clunky Apple File Exchange program before inserting the PC disk.)

The control panel itself (included with System 7.5) is designed to let you map various kinds of DOS or Windows files to appropriate Macintosh programs that know how to open them . After you’ve established these assignments, you can double-click a Word for Windows document on that IBM disk you inserted, and the document will open smoothly in your Mac version of Word.

PC Exchange Secrets

Off isn’t really off
The Off button in the PC Exchange control panel only disables PC Exchange temporarily. If you restart the Mac, PC Exchange pops right back on!

If you really don’t want PC Exchange lurking around, eating up perfectly good RAM, disable it using Extensions Manager or Conflict Catcher (included with Mac SECRETS).

Why you don’t want to use PC disks all the time
PC Exchange works so well that we’ve actually met people who have been using PC floppy disks — which they bought by mistake — for months without even noticing it. Since the Mac treats them exactly like Mac floppies, there’s no way those people would know.

Well, almost. PC floppies, mounted on your desktop via PC Exchange, are even slower than floppies usually are. Much slower. If this sounds like you, reformat your PC disks as Mac disks and enjoy the newfound speed.

Some commonly used PC-to-Mac links
In the control panel, you’re expected to set up links between the three-letter filename-extensions of the PC files you’ll be using (such as .TXT) and the creator codes for the programs you use on the Mac. Table 4-1 lists a few common matchups to get you started.

Table 4-1
PC-to-Mac link decoder ring

PC suffix        Mac Creator      Mac Type  Will open in

.AI              ART5 or ART3     TEXT      Illustrator

.TXT             MSWD             TEXT      Microsoft Word

.DOS             MSWD             TEXT      Microsoft Word

.ASC or .TXT     MSWD             TEXT      Microsoft Word

.JPG             8BIM             JPEG      PhotoShop

.PCX             8BIM             PICT      PhotoShop

.TIF             8BIM             TIFF      PhotoShop

.XP              XPR3             XDOC      QuarkXPress

PC Setup 

If you paid an extra $400 for your Mac to get a DOS Compatibility Card, meaning you can run DOS or Windows programs on your Mac, you can use this control panel to options only a DOS person could understand. 

Portable

This aging control panel came with Apple’s very first attempt at a laptop, the Mac Portable, and was also included with PowerBook models 100, 140, and 170. It serves as your sole defense against premature battery-charge depletion .

Its controls govern how quickly your hard drive and your whole computer go to sleep after a period of inactivity. Of course, sleep modes save battery juice, but short sleep intervals make it harder to get your work done. Details on all this stuff are in Chapter 14 — and below, under “PowerBook and PowerBook Setup.”

Power Macintosh Card

As you’ll read in Chapter 12, there are two ways to turn a standard Mac into a Power Macintosh: install a small PDS circuit board, or get a complete motherboard replacement. There’s a drawback to the upgrade card: you get only the speed boost of the PowerPC chip without any of the other Power Mac features (such as CD-quality sound and speech recognition).

The big advantage of the upgrade card, on the other hand, is that you can turn it off, restoring your Mac to its pre-Power Mac state. You might want to do that if, for example, you have a Quadra 800 and want to run Excel 4.0 (which, as a non-”native” program, runs faster on the Quadra than on the Power Macintosh chip). Or you might want to run some game that doesn’t work properly on the Power Mac.

This control panel is a simple on/off switch for the upgrade card. If you click Off, turn off the computer, and start it again, it reverts to its old, pre-Power Mac self. (Using the Restart command doesn’t do the trick; you have to shut down.)

This control panel, by the way, contains one great secret: its hidden credits. Open the control panel while pressing the Option key: you get a picture of the programmers. Now, if you turn on Balloon Help, you can point to each person’s mouth to get an introduction, and a witty remark, from each. (“Hi, I’m Erica. Do you want to buy any Girl Scout cookies?”).

PowerBook

The PowerBook control panel, born with System 7.1, is like a grownup version of the Portable control panel; its purpose in life is to save battery power at the expense of computing horsepower.

When you drag the little switch  into the Custom position, the dialog box expands to display three individual controls: System (how quickly the Mac goes to sleep after you stop using it), Screen Dims (how quickly the backlighting turns off), and Hard Disk Spins Down (how quickly the internal hard drive stops spinning). The farther to the left you place these sliders, the more battery power you’ll save — and the more irritating it will be to try to get real work done.

The two checkboxes eke out a few more dribbles of battery power by allowing your Mac’s processor chip to rest between bursts of activity (“Allow processor cycling”) or by slowing it (“Reduced processor speed”). You can really feel it when these options are turned on, too — your menu clock updates erratically, After Dark animations get jerky, and typing isn’t quite as responsive — but each battery charge does indeed last longer.

Beginning with version 7.2 of this panel (introduced with the Duo 250 and 270c, and also installed with System Update 3.0; see Chapter 4), you get a terrific feature. As in the commercial PowerBook utility kits, you can save one set of settings (quick-to-sleep) for battery use and another (maximum speed) for when the Mac is plugged in. Choose options from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog box as appropriate.

PowerBook control panel Secrets

Why you’re confused
With every new generation of PowerBook models, Apple revamps these control panels. If your older PowerBook’s software looks nothing like our illustrations, you have the old PowerBook control panel (before version 7.2). The older panel also contained today’s PowerBook Setup controls (SCSI Disk Mode and so on).

The Wake on Ring feature (in case you’re using your PowerBook as a fax machine) got moved, too, to PowerBook Setup. Of course, today’s young whippersnappers don’t even know what Wake on Ring is; it was only available on PowerBook 100-series models. In later models, it was replaced with that Automatic Wake-Up thing; see “PowerBook Setup control panel.”

Where are my battery-savings checkboxes?
If your PowerBook uses an ‘040 chip (such as the PowerBook 500 series or Duo 280), you’re probably wondering why you don’t have the two energy-saving checkboxes called “Allow processor cycling” and “Reduced processor speed.”

Well, you don’t have “Reduced processor speed” because your mile-a-minute ‘040 chip can’t slow down; that’s a feature only of ‘030 chips.

You do have processor cycling, though — it’s just hidden. To access it, flip the control panel’s upper-right switch to the Easy position (if it’s not already in that position). Then, while pressing Option, slide the switch to Custom. When the panel opens next time, you’ll see the processor-cycling checkbox, awaiting your command.

Roll credits!
Option-click the version number (PowerBook 7.2 or later); then tap the Option key repeatedly. Sooner or later, you’ll find Elvis.

There’s even a (boring) hidden credit in PowerBook Setup. Again, Option-click the version number.

PowerBook Display

When Apple figured out how to add a video-out jack to a PowerBook, it opened all kinds of possibilities for people who make presentations. You can plug an external monitor or projector into the video port, and your audience can watch the monitor while you watch your PowerBook screen.

This control panel simply allows you to turn mirroring on or off. When your two monitors are mirrored, the same image appears on both screens; you and your audience see the same thing. When mirroring is off, though, you have two independent monitors. Your audience can be watching slides on the external screen while you’re privately reading your notes on the PowerBook screen. It’s pretty great.

Earlier versions of this control panel also control how fast the built-in screen’s backlighting goes off. (Backlighting is another big battery-juice consumer.) After a specified period of inactivity, the backlighting goes off, only to reawaken when you touch a key or move the trackball. Apple eventually removed the Screen Dimming control, because a much more powerful screen dimmer is built into the PowerBook control panel (7.2 or later).

PowerBook Setup

If your PowerBook comes with version 7.2 (or later) of the PowerBook control panel, you have an additional panel called PowerBook Setup . This panel contains SCSI Disk Mode settings for more flexibility when you’re using SCSI Disk Mode (see Chapter 14) and Automatic Wake-Up. There’s not a word about this Wake-Up thing in the PowerBook manual, so we’re not exactly sure what it’s for. I guess we’ll just murmur something about letting this feature wake the PowerBook at a specified time in the middle of the night to receive a fax from Japan, and leave it at that.

If you have a built-in modem, you’ll also find here the dreaded Compatible/Normal switch. Consider the frustration of PowerBook owners trying to get this internal modem to work, who must choose between those two options — “Compatible” vs. “Normal”! How are they supposed to make a decision? More on this topic in Chapter 14. For now, just note that if you have a Global Village internal modem (for your PowerBook 500-series or Duo), and its software is 2.5 or later, this control has been moved to the “PowerPort for 500 & Duo series” control panel.

PowerTalk Setup

PowerTalk, the optional RAM-and-disk-hungry System 7.5 feature, is described more fully in Chapter 6. This control panel, however, is the master on/off switch; it also lets you configure and open your Key Chain (your master password system).