For some months now, I've been struggling with my old Quadra 700/Daystar PowerPro 601 accelerator hybrid system trying to get it to work reliably. In the process I've had to upgrade MacOS 7.5.3 on top of 7.5, and then 7.5.5 on top of 7.5.3, all incrementally, because Apple didn't offer a single, all in one CD with the latest version having all of the latest bells and whistles.

Because of the incremental upgrades, I've been unable to determine whether the system instabilities I've been experiencing were due to the MacOS, or to some incompatibility with the PowerPC accelerator I'd installed to give it a couple of years more life. (I'm holding off on buying a new Power Mac until Apple has actually demonstrated that its new modern OS rewrite would run on it. Apple insists all currently selling PowerPC Macs, using the Motorola 603e and 604e CPU, will run the future RhapsodyOS, but they've changed courses too many times for me to leap again too quickly.)

So, it's been with bated breath that I've been waiting for a consolidated version of the OS to be released on one CD, one that I could install and have some confidence that the system installed itself correctly, without any obscure corrupted files to cloud the issue with the accelerator. Daystar's only comment to my troubles has been that MacOS 7.5.2 was the last version they had confirmed worked with the accelerator.

To begin, I'd need to have a clean hard disk with nothing on it that might cause potential conflicts. Since I upgraded my system with the accelerator, I've been running it from an external Quantum 2GB drive, and only after months of trial and error have I gotten everything more or less stable. Not everything works as it should, but it works. There's no way I'm going to mess with it until I get a better configuration working on another drive. So, I turn to the old internal Quantum 240 that was my mainstay for so many years.

MacOS 7.6 will need 70-120MB of free space to install all its bits and pieces, depending on the features you select, so I started by compressing the old System Folder with Stuffit and moving it over to another drive. Then I threw away all the old things I should have gotten rid of years ago, but had no need to. When I was done, I'd freed up about 180MB.

The next step was to update the drivers on the disk. Since I'd purchased the drive separately when I bought the Quadra, the Apple driver utility on the MacOS 7.6 CD wouldn't work with it, so I used FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0.5. (Be sure to use this latest version. There are problems with earlier versions.) Then I needed to consolidate all of the free space on the disk, so I turned to Norton Utilities 3.2.1 (again, use only this latest version!!) to defragment the files spread out all over the disk and consolidate them, freeing up a large consolidated empty block of space on the disk to install the new system.

Now I was ready to begin! Having done all of this clean-up and housekeeping on the disk, the install should go without a hitch, and it did! For users with a standard Mac with its built-in hard disk and CD-ROM drive, Apple has rewritten the install utility so that you can perform much of this as you go through the install process. It won't defragment the disk, but it will scan the disk to make sure that there are no problems that would interfere with the install process, and it will also install the latest disk drivers on Apple drives.

Once I restarted the Mac after the install, everything worked in a way that I'd never experienced with the incremental upgrades I'd had to do on the external drive. All the pieces actually worked! Even Open Transport 1.1.1/PPP! (I've had to use FreePPP on the external drive, because I couldn't get the OT/PPP portion of 7.5.5 to ever work properly.)

So, do you need it? It depends on your situation. In my case, yes. In yours, if everything in your incremental upgrade to 7.5.5 seems to be working OK, maybe not. MacOS 7.6 is basically a consolidated release of all the pieces in the incremental upgrades to 7.5.5, with some bug fixes thrown in, plus OpenDoc and CyberDog (which Apple may be discarding).

There's a new bell and whistle you can set to speak dialog boxes now, and users with external CD-ROM drives won't need to use a third party driver anymore to get it to work. I've held up installing FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit in the new system because MacOS 7.6 seems to control it perfectly, even automatically starting audio CDs when they're inserted.

Open Transport is now up to version 1.1.2, but MacOS 7.6 installs 1.1.1. Of course, that will always be the case. Upgrading software never ends. The issue is whether it works as is to meet your needs.

If you're still using an pre-PowerPC (68K) Mac (one whose numbering scheme uses three numbers instead of four), you'll need the new Code Fragment Manager CFM-68K 4.0 Apple just released to be able to run OpenDoc, CyberDog, or America On-line 3.0 for 68K Macs (when it's released).

What are the other immediate benefits? Well, it seems to be much more stable, but time will tell. And the Finder seems to be more responsive, as well. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied, so far.

The BIG news will be the MacOS 8.0 release due this summer. It will have the Copland interface (the shareware Aaron's look), and a multithreaded Finder. So, you'll be able to format a floppy and do something else, like surf the web, at the same time. Many will want to wait until then, but Apple reports that sales have been brisk for this consolidated release CD.

The bottom line is that if your system has become unfixable because of all the tweaking you've had to do to keep it running, this could be your solution. For now, it's mine.

- Dave Marsh