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MicroMac Performer

MicroMac Performer (16 MHz 68030) in Mac SE

Luca Fornari reports:

About a year ago, a friend of mine gave me a Mac SE (you know the type 68000 8 MHz 2.5 MB RAM). A real snail, almost useless, but it was so cute I decided to keep it and put in 4 MB so I could run some software on it - mostly internet stuff.

Even pulling down a menu was a project, the pointer would trail the mouse a few seconds. Launching AOL 2.6 was a pain.

One day I saw an ad for an accelerator for the SE, Micromac's Performer. $49 for a 68030 16 MHz upgrad. $49? You can't go wrong with that, so I bought it from their web site <http://www.micromac.com>.

It arrived a few days later ,the box contained the accelerator card with a 50 pages manual very well explained. Following the instruction I install the card and the software. It takes about 15 minutes.

The card is compatible with System 6.0.7, 6.0.8, 7.0 with tune up 1.1.1, and 7.1; it will not work with 7.0.1.

After restart I notice the Mac takes a long time to boot. Once booted, though, you realize right away how much faster your Mac runs.

Almost a year later I still use the SE as a portable Mac. I bring it with me everywhere I go. I run AOL 2.6,Claris Emailer 1.0, ClarisWork 2.1, some old arcade games, Newswatcher, Excel 1.0, FileMaker Pro 2.1 and even QuarkXpress 3.2 but this one's really slow when redrawing graphics.

I use a SupraFaxModem 28.8, a Zip drive, and an external Cd-ROM drive, and never had an hardware problem.

I get occasional errors on the SE, but no more than I did before the card was installed - and usually only when using AOL (?). I bet they would go away if I'd use AOL 2.5. A few freezes occurs when using some old games and Claris Emailer.

Concluding, at $49 this is a great buy if you want to keep your compact Mac active and efficient. This card made a more or less useless Mac into a great internet machine, word processor, database, and even a great fax machine. There is also a version with FPU which should improve the speed even more, especially when redrawing the screen.

There are other cards for this machine that are faster, some with video in for plugging in a video card, but they cost a lot more.

Great card and great service.

Luca F.

Go to Mac SE.

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