Making the Most of the LC

The LC and LC II are not among the best vintage machines available, but by performing the right upgrades and running the right programs, they can be made very useable.

The LC and LC II were some of the first Macs able to use a PC's VGA monitor. If you bought the original 12" RGB or monochrome monitor, you may want to buy a larger monitor. The fact that the LC and LC II support 640 x 480 on a PC monitor makes it easy to find a monitor. Just pick up any old PC monitor, such as a Sony Trinitron 14" or another VGA compatible 14" monitor. Get a Mac to VGA adapter from a place like CompUSA; if one of their employees is in a good mood, he may just give you one for free.

Once you get your monitor hooked up, you might notice you are only getting 16 colours on the screen. This is because the LC and LC II came standard with only 256K of VRAM. You can upgrade it to 512K by replacing the 256K VRAM SIMM with a 512K one.

The next thing to do is upgrade the RAM to the 10 MB maximum. The LC comes with 2 MB on the motherboard, whereas the LC II comes with 4 MB. There are two RAM slots, right next to the VRAM slot (the two small slots are for RAM). These slots are for 30-pin SIMMs. To upgrade to 10 MB, install two 4 MB 30-pin SIMMs. Although on the LC II it seems like you are upgrading to 12 MB, the ROMs limit what can be addressed to 10 of the 12 MB.

There is a wide choice of operating systems for your LC or LC II. The LC and LC II shipped with either System 6.0.8L, 7.0, or 7.0.1. 6.0.8L was shipped in some other countries, since at that time the international version of System 7 was not ready. The LC or LC II will not boot with a standard System 6 disk; 6.0.8L is the only version of System 6 that will work with them.

Some LCs shipped with 7.0, but most came with 7.0.1. System 7.0.1 was a bug fix for several models of Macintosh, including the LC and LC II. It makes no difference if you are running 7.0 or 7.0.1 on a IIx, but it improves the reliability of the LC and LC II.

If you need your LC or LC II for a simple task such as word processing, I recommend running System 6.0.8L. It is very fast. If you need your Mac for the Internet or email, I would go with System 7.1. I wouldn't use 7.0.1• (• is with the tune up) since most semi-modern internet applications will not run on anything before 7.1. This includes FreePPP, which is one of the best PPP connection tools for older Macs. It is almost essential for getting on the Internet with an older Mac.

For word processing, try to install something that is not as processor demanding as most of the newer programs are. Good choices would be ClarisWorks 3.0, WriteNow 3.0, MacWrite/MacWrite Pro, or early versions of Microsoft Word (4.0-5.1a). Don't use Word 6 on an LC or LC II; the computer can't handle it, and you will find yourself facing crashes several times a day.

For email, don't use anything more feature laden than Eudora 3.1.3, or Microsoft Internet Mail and News 1.1. Claris Emailer Lite 1.1v3 works fine as well.

For web browsing, try MacWeb, Internet Explorer 2.1, or Netscape Navigator 2.0.2. Of course you can use the whole Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook Express 4, but it tends not to work very well at all on an LC or LC II. Either application uses almost all of the 10 MB of RAM maximum, and the whole combination uses about 30 MB of hard disk space, whereas most LC and LC II Macs came with 40 or 80 MB hard disks.

If you want to give your LC or LC II a new life, there are a number of upgrades available, including several from MicroMac, and even one from Sonnet that includes a 68040 or 68LC040 processor, 32 MB of RAM, and a 10Base-T Ethernet card, all in one upgrade. The Presto Plus comes at a high cost though, about US$399.

There is another way to go. Buy a used LC 475 or Quadra 605 logic board, a 32 MB 72-pin SIMM, and an ethernet card. If you have an original Macintosh LC, you must replace the speaker/fan assembly with a separate speaker and fan like that used in the LC II and higher. With the logic board upgrade, you will get very similar performance to that of the upgrade card for only about $75, instead of the $399.

If you do decide to go this route, make sure you have System 7.1 with enabler 065 installed on the hard drive of your computer before you install the new motherboard. You can find information on what software to run on your new Macintosh "LC" Quadra 605 by reading Quadras Still Useful.

With a few upgrades, your Mac LC or LC II can last as long as any other 68030 based Mac.

Editor's note: The LC and LC II can handle huge hard drives, so the biggest limitation is memory. After you've upgraded to the 10 MB maximum, you can use RAM Doubler on the LC II to simulate 30 MB of memory. (Alas, the LC doesn't have the memory manager that makes that possible.) You still don't want to run anything that uses more memory than you have installed, but it does make it possible to have more programs in memory at the same time.

Also, it should be noted that LCs and LC IIs are dirt cheap these days. You may pay more for a mouse or keyboard than for the computer itself. These are great little email and word processing machines. They even play some games well.