More System 7 Answers -- Brian Jewett <bjewett@ncsa.uiuc.edu> adds another thing to check for when experiencing Bad F-line errors. After much trouble, he discovered the culprit was an old ROM in his RasterOps video board, which was apparently not 32-bit QuickDraw-friendly. So consider older hardware in strange troubleshooting situations.

Quinn <quinn@cs.uwa.edu.au> chimes in that if you experience a weird system error while running on a 68040 machine, it's worth testing with the caches off. There are utilities to shut them off flexibly, but you can also open the Cache Switch Control Panel, hold down the option key, and click the More Compatible button. If your Cache Switch Control Panel is missing, look on your System disks; it usually ships on the Tidbits disk.

Jon Pugh <jpugh@apple.com> supplies additional answers that we hadn't known. You can get 8-bit icons for floppies by setting the Custom Icon bit for the floppy by dropping it on FileTyper 4.0. Also, we mentioned AppleScript as a reason to upgrade to System 7.1, but Jon says AppleScript runs fine under 7.0 and 7.0.1. AppleScript is shipping from APDA, although they may not have disks in quantity yet.

Todd Hooper <todd@dialix.oz.au> comments that reformatting your hard drive to retrieve that extra bit of space may cause the HFS bug we discussed last issue to appear. If you do reformat your hard disk and change partition sizes, run the Disk Bug Checker before you rely on the disk heavily.

Alex McCormick <amcc@leland.stanford.edu> notes that zapping the PRAM as a troubleshooting measure is a good idea, but will require some work to reset your default settings (time and date and all that). The most important thing to watch, though, is that zapping the PRAM will also kill a PowerBook's RAM disk, which may contain information you don't have backed up.