Apple Provides Free Upgrade to 8.5.1

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.