Ask Dave – Internal Speakers, Claris Organizer, & AOL Images

"But underwear never gets held out like eels," he said as he ran from the forest. Little did he know that… oh…. yes… It’s that time again already? Well, I guess putting on the ol’ thinking cap wouldn’t be a bad thing after all that silliness. Let’s see what’s in the mail bin this week… lots of little questions it seems… well, that sounds great! Onward we go! If you have your own question, feel free to e-mail me or ask in the forums, otherwise read on! We’ve got questions today about external speaker setup, older versions of Claris Organizer, problematic picture e-mails, and settings for reconnecting to file servers. Enjoy!

Josh Reiter writes, "What’s up? I just bought a pair of speakers from a friend for my iMac 350mhz w/OS9. The speakers are plugged into the side sound out port. They are good, but is it possible for the internal speakers to work at the same time? I hope you can help me."

Josh — I wish I could help. However, that feature has been missing from the Mac OS since QuickTime 4 was introduced and the new Sound Manager was installed. The only way to get your internal speakers to work is to unplug the external speakers. Perhaps some day Apple will "go back" to letting us "unmute" the internal speakers, but until then, we’re stuck.

Jeffrey V. writes, "Our computer is a UMAX S900i recently upgraded to Mac OS 8.6. Most applications are either running smoothly or were successfully up- graded. The nagging hangover is Claris Organizer v1.0 which ran beautifully on OS 8.1 but refuses to stabilize on OS 8.6 giving type-2 or type-11 error messages. We’ve repeatedly trashed the preferences for reboot, but still no luck. The Apple web site offers an upgrade from 2.0 to 2.0v2 but despite extensive searching we are striking out big time with respect to a 1.0 to 2.0 upgrade. Any guidance, direction, assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated."

Well, Jeffrey, I think there’s a solution here, albeit a strange one. I believe that the Palm Desktop software was actually built from the codebase used for Claris Organizer, and the two are very similar in function. Palm Computing has kept the software very much up-to-date, and the data files are still similar enough that you should be able to pull all your data into the Palm Desktop software easily. The manual for the Palm Desktop says to go to "File" and choose "Merge", then select your organizer data and you should be all set! The best part about it is that Palm has made their software available as a free download from their Web site!

Sheila Sensel writes, "Help!!! My son just sent me photographs of my new grandson via e-mail. However, I just get the text and not the pictures. What do I do? I have a PowerPC 5400/120. Use Internet Explorer. I don’t know if you need any more information. I am dying to see these pictures."

Believe it or not, I see this problem a lot, so I figured it was worth a public mention. The problem is on the sender’s end. Your son is probably using AOL, and has included the pictures in the body of the e-mail message. For those of you "non-AOL’ers" out there, AOL now allows you to include pictures right in the body of an e-mail message (as opposed to sending them as an attachment). However, it seems as though only AOL users can receive these "inline" images. When the e-mail is sent to anyone outside of AOL, the pictures are simply stripped from the message and all you get is the text. In order for your son to send you pictures, he’ll need to add them as attachments to the message, and then you’ll receive them as such. Note that if he adds more than one picture to each e-mail message, AOL will automatically Stuff (or Zip, if he’s on Windows) the files together into one archive. You’ll need to use something like Stuffit Expander to extract the pictures from this archive (yes, Stuffit will also unZip files now, so that should be the only program you’ll need). Then you can view the pictures with Internet Explorer, Apple’s Picture Viewer, or a 3rd party application like GraphicConverter.

Monte Thompson writes, "Hi Dave, I have 12 G4’s running OS 9.0.4. When I set them up initially I use my login to mount our server volumes where a lot of my Mac tools are. When the machine has been configured and is just about ready to install on the end users desk I change over to their login/password. I have several machines that insist on starting up with my login and ask for my password. Easy enough, trash AppleShare Prep and login with the users info (I use "save name only" because we have no use for keychain with only one login/password). The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve gone on to trash everything related to networking in the prefs file including Users/Groups prefs, Open Transport prefs and TCP/IP to name a few. These few G4’s adamantly pop up with the login/password window with my li remembered and patiently await my password. The question is: what am I not trashing that I should be to reset this thing?"

Yup… I fought with this one myself. It seems as though Mac OS 9 adds one more place where it stores this type of stuff. There is now a "Servers" folder in the System Folder that contains Aliases to file servers. Trashing the contents of the Servers folder should solve the problem.

That’s it for this one, folks. Have a great week, and I’ll see you next time. Feel free to e-mail me your questions at [email protected], or visit the Ask Dave! Forums and see what everyone has to offer!

P.S. Have a Nice Day.