Macintosh Classic II Date of purchase: 09/06/2005 Price: $40 Original Price: $1900 (circa 1991)

Description: Macintosh Classic II system, 4MB RAM, 40MB Harddrive, Internal 1.44 Floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, system manual. Also included was an HP Laser Printer, however, this was found to not be working. Unsure if it is the printer itself or the power supply. No system floppies were included, however, System 7.1 was running on the harddrive. The system comes with an internal black and white monitor. There is not external monitor port.

Opening the system revealed that it has no FPU (Floating Point Processor).

Goals: To get this puppy on the internet using my local network and max out the system as much as possible.

RAM: The system has 4MB of RAM: 2MB on the motherboard, 2MB installed in 2x1MB 30-pin SIMMS. The system can handle 10MB of RAM using the 2MB onboard and 2x4MB 30-pin SIMMS. I looked everywhere in my house for all my 30-pin SIMMS. I found about 20 of them, but they were all 1MB SIMMS. So, I ordered two 4MB 30-pin SIMMS for $16 a piece (I know, a bit pricey for 2005). However, a later check on ebay didn't reveal anything reliable at the time. A few days after the RAM was ordered, I found 5 of these 4MB 30-pin SIMMS in a box. I put 2 of them inside the system and now I have 10MB of RAM. I wasn't able to cancel the other order, but I am going to use those in another old Mac system, once that is acquired. Since I now have 10MB of RAM, I turned on 32-bit addressing and upped the disk cache from 32k to 128k to try and increase the performance. This was done in the Memory Control Panel.

So what does going from 4MB of RAM to 10MB of RAM mean for system performance? Well, not much, but every bit helps. Here are stats using the classic application, Speedometer 4.02. For the full stats, you can click on the download link. They will open in a text editor.

With 4MB of RAM:
CPU: 0.250
Graphics: 0.144
Disk: 0.726 Name of Hard Disk tested: 40MB_MacHD
Math: 0.805
Performance Rating: 0.245
Mac_Classic_II_4MB_RAM_NO_FPU.TXT

With 10MB OF RAM:
CPU: 0.252
Graphics: 0.142
Disk: 0.730 Name of Hard Disk tested: 40MB_MacHD
Math: 0.812
Performance Rating: 0.245
Mac_Classic_II_10MB_RAM_NO_FPU.TXT

As you can see, there really wasn't much of a difference when just mentioning those 4 stats. I have to do the stats for 32-bit addressing ON.

Operating System Upgrade: Well, this system can handle up to 7.6.1, however, 7.6 costs money. So, until I can find someone that I can borrow a copy from, I downloaded System 7.5 free and made floppies from it (7 of them). I upgraded 7.1 to 7.5. Systen 7.5.3 is also free, but I have to wait until I have the bigger harddrive and also the networking capability.

Harddrive: Well, 40MB is not a lot, so I ordered a 500MB 50-pin SCSI harddrive off of ebay. I bought it AS-IS. I got it, put it in an it had OS 8.1 on it, so of course this didn't want to load on my old system. However, upon rebooting a few times to put 7.5 on it, the harddrive died. And it stayed dead. So, I ordered a 2GB 50-pin SCSI harddrive off of ebay. Waiting for that...

Networking: This system does not have built in ethernet. However, I was able to purchase a SCSI to Ethernet adapter (Asante mini en/sc) on ebay for about $30. I am still waiting for that to arrive.

CDROM: Well, these are about $20 on ebay right now with about $14 shipping. I am going to see if I can get along without one using networking installing.