Patches & Support files - April '98

Updates and fixes from this month's
Bug Patrol Column

Rose Vines finds bugs and provides fixes and workarounds for your favourite applications.

Since the release of PageMaker 6.5 in early 1997, Adobe has produced a series of updates, filters, plug-ins and converters that have fixed problems in the software and extended its features and functions. In recent months there has been a flood of activity, with a new filter fixing the spreadsheet import problem we mentioned in the January Bug Patrol column, plus many other updates and additions.

To make life easy for you, PC User is including all the updates that Adobe has released for PageMaker 6.5 on this month's CD-ROM, creating a complete update kit.

If you're currently using PageMaker 6.50 or 6.51, you should first update your version to 6.52 using the updater (pm652upd.exe, with information about the update contained in pm652upd.txt). You can check which version you're currently running by watching the splash screen as PageMaker loads, or checking the Help Menu, About option. The updater will fix a number of problems in the earlier versions of 6.5, and will also make it possible for you to install all of the following filters, updates, converters and plug-ins that we've included on the PC User Offline CD-ROM:

No doubt if you read our guide to Internet Explorer 4 in the November 1997 issue you were thrilled to see that the new version of Microsoft's browser supported resumed downloads. Then, when you got your hands on the release version of IE4, you probably searched in vain for this function.

Unfortunately, Microsoft scrapped this feature in the release version. We don't know why -- we can only mourn the loss. It's extraordinary that this is not a standard feature of all Web browsers, just as it was a standard feature of bulletin board file transfers using Zmodem protocol way back in pre-Web times.

Netscape Navigator (and Communicator) 4 do, however, support resumed downloads as we mentioned in the guide, with one caveat: resumed downloads of large files do not appear to work when you access the Net via a proxy server.

An increasing number of Iomega Zip drive owners have been reporting what's been dubbed the 'click of death'. The click of death is as bad as it sounds: you put a Zip disk into the drive and hear a repeated click, click, click. The repeated clicking is a result of the drive head failing to find data to read -- even though data is present -- and extending out as far as it can go in its search and coming up against the drive bumpers. Instead of reading from or writing to the disk, drives suffering from the click of death frequently either write protect or corrupt the contents of the disk.

If your Zip drive is suffering click of death, first try it on another disk -- one that does not contain important information. If the clicking persists and your drive is under warranty, you should contact your Iomega dealer for a replacement.

While Iomega is downplaying the problem and suggesting that it's restricted to one bad batch of drives, PC User encountered this problem with a new drive over a year ago, while most of the current reports are coming from customers who have bought drives recently. This doesn't sound like a single bad batch to us.

You can find a little more information about the problem at Iomega's Web site (www.iomega.com/support/techs/zip/2135.html). There is also independent discussion of the problem in a couple of Internet newsgroups (alt.iomega.zip.jazz and comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc) and at the Unofficial Iomega Page at www.juip.com.

In our March issue, we mentioned the bugs besetting version 3 of Symantec's Norton Utilities.

Symantec has since released LiveUpdate 2, which fixes many of the reported bugs.

You can get the update by right-clicking on the LiveUpdate Sensor in System Doctor and selecting Launch, or you can install the update file now from this month's PC User Offline CD-ROM.