FTLComm - Tisdale - December 8, 1998
Apple realised that there were some minor difficulties with the new OS 8.5 and yesterday
8.5.1 was released. The upgrade is around 3MB and can be downloaded from Apple's
operating system site. The beauty of this upgrade is that it installs in seconds
and needs no input from the user merely a click to install and the repairs are made.
The upgrade does not add any new elements to the operating system but instead repairs
the existing problems that users of the new operating system have been experiencing.
One of the main one of these was memory leakage. What happens with OS 8.5 is that
as you use your computer with it installed each Apple Script allows some of the desktop
RAM to disappear and after using the machine for a while it will simply run out of
memory. There was also a problem using FileMaker Pro which frequently goes
to the hard drive and we at FTLComm use FileMaker each and every day and were
experiencing this mysterious problem, well, now it is solved.
The new search protocol of the operating system, Sherlock, has been enhanced
with this upgrade as more plug-ins have been installed and Sherlock can now handle
proxy servers which was beyond it in its earlier version.
Though the information describing the upgrade indicates that the problems it is fixing
were obscure and rarely occurred, this is not actually the case almost every user
of OS 8.5 would have stumbled into one or more of the bugs in the system after only
a week or two of use and some of the bugs were especially difficult to understand.
With a major system crash Mac OS 8.5 users discovered that their machine might be
reluctant to restart from the CD, this scary bug has been fixed. Another nasty trick
of 8.5 involves difficulties with the hard drive directory and this also has been
repaired but had the potential to be very destructive.