Odds & Ends: iMac loan; Expander issue; virus on MacAddict Disc; and more

Apple announces its "Own a Mac for $29.95 a Month" deal The press release adds: "All iMacs now come loaded with Mac OS 8.5, Apple's "must have" upgrade to the Macintosh operating system. All iMacs are also now equipped with ATI's Rage Pro Turbo graphics controller and 6MB of video RAM, for increased graphics performance. Adobe PageMill 3.0 has been added to the selection of consumer software that comes with iMac."

Meanwhile, as covered in MacWEEK , iMacs arrived at Best Buy Stores today. Another MacWEEK article covers recent speculation about iMac sales.

StuffIt Expander and Netscape 4.5 As noted by Sally Shears and Ari Ollikainen, Netscape 4.5 browsers ship with StuffIt Expander 4.5 instead of the 4.02 version that came with earlier browser versions. Expander 4.02 would directly expand .hqx and .bin files. However, Expander 4.5 does not; instead you get a message that says you should purchase DropStuff with Expander Enhancer in order to decode these files. As decoding .hqx and .bin files is the main reason to use Expander with a Web browser, the wisdom of this change is questionable.

AutoStart virus on December MacAddict Disc As stated on a MacAddict Web page, "The Disc in the December issue of MacAddict contains what we believe to be a harmlessvariant of this virus--the Dvariant of the AutoStart 9805 Worm." The page provides the now standard advice as to how to deal with this. The safest advice is to discard the disc altogether. (Thanks, Ron Timms and others).

QuickTime minor glitch solved Last September, Dale Sorenson described an odd QuickTime-related bug, where the message offering the QuickTime Pro upgrade was distorted. He now has the explanation: "After I installed version 4.0.6 of the TwinTurbo drivers from IXMicro," the problem disappeared.

Digital cameras, PC cards and desktop Macs In our report on digital cameras, we note the advantages of of using a PC card adapter to transfer pictures from the camera's card to your computer. This is fine if you have a PowerBook, but what about for a desktop Mac? Kevin Price informs us that Minolta makes an SCSI PC Card unit (for under $100) that lets you use PC Cards with desktop Macs.

SyQuest and DriveSavers In the wake of SyQuest's bankruptcy filing, DriveSavers, Inc., a company specializing in data recovery of damaged hard drives and removable media, announced that it stands ready to help with your SyQuest-related problems.

Internet Explorer 4.5 in development Microsoft sent MacFixIt a note about development of the next generation of Internet Explorer. Here is an excerpt: "Internet Explorer 4.5 for Macintosh, to be released in the same time-frame as IE 5.0 for Windows, is currently in active development. However, because we are in the development phase of our product, it is too early to begin discussing specifics of the product."

Freeway 2.0, a major upgrade to this Web design program, is now available. "Freeway has been designed to meet the needs of graphic designers who want an intuitive but powerful tool which gives them the ability to design Web sites without theneed to master HTML."

BBEDit 5.0 is out.