Upgrades for a Centris 610, Performa 630

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Feedback: Mac Daniel 99.01.06

Upgrades for a Centris 610, Performa 630

Dan Knight

Centris 610

BS writes: I have a Centris 610 that I bought about 7 months ago as my first computer and my first Mac. I bought it solely for use on the Internet. I started off using Netscape Navigator 4.0 but an unfortunate accident while trying upgrade it forced me to replace it with whatever I could find. What I could find was Netscape Gold 3.0, a prerelease beta I believe. It was the best thing I could have done. It takes up less hard drive space than Navigator 4.0, plus I get the features of Communicator like email and news. Oh, and it does Java too. Not well, but much better than Navigator 4.0 would (which is not at all with a 68040)

Performa 630

MP writes: I've got a Performa 637CD, which is still my main computer, although I will probably be buying a new G3 sometime this year because it is so slow, but I have done a bit up updating along the way. I started with System 7.5, 8 MB RAM, and a 350 MB hard drive. I now have System 8.1, 36 MB of RAM, and a 6.4 GB internal IDE hard drive. I have the hard drive partitioned into two parts, a 1 GB HFS partition and a 5.4 GB HFS+ partition. It boots off of the small partition because of the limitation that the 68040 chip has with HFS+. For many of my CDs that I use frequently, I have used Disk Copy to make images of the CDs on the large partition and created AppleScript scripts to mount the image and then run the application and put an alias of the script on my launcher for one click mounting and running. This allows me to run my CD applications at hard drive speed since I haven't gotten a faster CD-ROM drive - it's still the old 2x one. For Internet access I use a 28.8 modem since I don't know how much it will matter if I upgrade it to the 56k because of the serial port limitation. It's a bit slow, but very adequate.

For expandability options that I haven't done and have thought about, I have seen 64 MB and 128 MB RAM chips that will work on this computer - they are a special high-rise version, but I don't remember where I saw these offered. They were a bit to pricey for me, I'm thinking maybe $2/MB. As for other upgrades, you can swap out the motherboard and put in a motherboard from a 6300 series Performa which is G3 upgradable. The 6360 is the best of this series. I've seen the motherboards for sale at some online shops and at auctions, ranging from $300-$500. You can also find the 601/60 card that fits in these computers sometimes, usually for around $300 or so used.

-Mitch Planck

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