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8.1 and Counting (2/22/98)
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Okay, we admit it. We dragged our feet on installing the Mac OS 8.1 upgrade. Basically, when you've got thousands of soap opera addicts who need their daily fix, it seems irresponsible to risk the possibility of rendering them soapless by recklessly upgrading the system software on the machine used to produce the show. What makes the situation even more ironic is that we rushed to download the update from Apple's servers the very instant it was posted a month ago; the self-mounting image has been sitting on a Zip disk at AtAT Central ever since.
What finally spurred us to action was the CNET review of Apple's update that we came across via MacSurfer this afternoon. After being reminded of 8.1's features, such as faster Finder screen draws when opening a folder, better stability, and improved virtual memory management (which reduces application launch times by 25-50%), we finally decided to back up our whole boot drive and install the thing. At first the update found hard disk corruption on the boot disk that it couldn't repair, since it was the startup volume, but it told us to boot from the emergency floppy and try again. We did, it repaired the damage, and now we're merrily chugging along with Mac OS 8.1 running under the hood.
We haven't been running it long enough to see any immediate benefits, but we may just take the big plunge and reformat our secondary hard drive (a 4.3 GB Seagate Barracuda) with the Mac OS Extended Format, otherwise known as HFS+. We'd like to reap the benefits of a less-wasteful block allocation scheme, but we've been waiting for a disk repair utility that actually understands HFS+ to emerge. Luckily for us, TechTool Pro 2.0 is due for release sometime in the next few weeks, and they're currently closing out copies of the 1.0 version for cheap-- including a free upgrade. The special offer hasn't appeared on the EvangeList web site yet, but it should pop up here very shortly. Ahhh, it feels good to be current...
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SceneLink (474)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/22/98 episode: February 22, 1998: Mac OS 8.1 has finally come to AtAT's virtual land, spreading stability and speed everywhere it goes. Meanwhile, a grassroots Mac web advocacy campaign gains the omnipresent Don Crabb's seal of approval, and the Mac climate in Japan drops a few degrees with the disappointing nature of the recent Expo...
Other scenes from that episode: 475: It Still Just Works (2/22/98) Way back in October, we told you about Bill Vlahos, a Mac user who started a grass-roots advertising campaign called "Macintosh, It Just Works!" Basically Bill wanted to spread the word about the Mac's biggest advantage: that, most of the time, working and playing on a Mac is a lot more trouble-free than doing so on any other computer... 476: What's Japanese for Ow? (2/22/98) MacWorld Expo Tokyo just finished up, and a MacWEEK article has some sparse coverage of the event. Why so sparse? According to a Macintouch source, it's because the show was very disappointing. Reportedly the keynote address was "thin," but apparently that wasn't necessarily a real problem, since the hall was only 2/3 full, even though the keynote was a free event this year...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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