Re: [WinMac] Mac OS 8.6

John C. Welch(jwelch[at]aer.com)
Thu, 27 May 1999 12:58:24 -0500

"Daniel L. Schwartz" wrote:
>
> [note from the moderator: I don't want this to degenerate into
> another Windows/Mac war, but Dan provides some useful information
> here]
>
> Hmmm, let's see: I didn't have to reinstall any drivers
>when installing
> NT4's Service Pack 2, 3, 4, & 5.

You're very lucky then, I had NT4 sp4 break my NFS client drivers to the
point of constant bluescreening. Couldn't boot off of anything that let
me into the system to delete the NFS drivers. Thank go for shift-boot on
the Mac. (and don't talk about safe mode in Win9X. What mental midget at
microsoft decided that booting without the CD-ROM usable was a good idea?)

>If we look at MacOS 8.5, we see that
> Service Pack 1 ("MacOS 8.5.1") and Service Pack 2 ("MacOS 8.6") may have
> needed new drivers.

The only ones I've seen are for CPU upgrade cards. 30 Macs from 8.1 to
8.6 via 8.5 and 8.5.1 without a single driver download and update required.

>AND, these drivers operate down in CPU Ring Zero
> (Supervisor or Kernel Mode), so they are indeed quite easy to break.

You mean like NT4 having the video drivers in the Kernel? Oops,
something bad happened while you were upgrading your video card. Your
kernel is hosed. Please reinstall NT. (I've had to recover 4 machines
from this)

>
> And let's not forget how MacOS 8.5/SP2, err, MacOS 8.6
>broke the latest
> released version of Adobe Type Manager. I don't think any of the NT4
> Service Packs did that trick...

Incorrect, it broke ATM DELUXE. ATM, (the control panel), still works
fine. Has all along.

>
> At 07:38 PM 5/24/99 -0500, David Bell <db28@alphainfo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> [cut]
>
> >In my view, while perhaps the 8.6 installer might have handled this a bit
> >more cleanly, one always needs to take care in such situations, and be
> >ready to re-install the additional drivers if necessary. (Surely it
> >should not be necessary to point this sort of thing out on a list that
> >deals extensively with Windows issues :-)

ANYTIME you apply an OS update or patch, there exists a reasonable
chance of something breaking. Regardless of platform. Plan for it, and
it isn't a big deal. Don't plan for it, and feel Murphy's wrath.

John

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