Another LCIII rescue!

[agent_js03]

G'day All, long time lurker, 1st time poster!

So I got a lovely little LCIII a while back which had leaking caps and I've decided to restore it. I love these little machines, they remind me of the Centris 610 I had back in the 90's (although that was a 68040). It was actually working but if left any longer it prolly would have succumbed to corrosion damage.

My school had 610s as well when I was a kid. It was nostalgia for those machines that got me into the old mac hobby to begin with. It is also the reason why I got an LC III (that, and it was 15 dollars on craigslist ). I have been setting it up just like the ones at my old school, with System 7.5, Hyperstudio, and Oregon trail, and let the nostalgia begin.

 

[dJOS]

How does it run with the SCSI2SD in there? The old 80 meg drive in my LCIII+ is still chuggin away but its definitely the bottleneck of the system, especially when I'm on the web or on Hotline.  It downloads from my cable internet at about 180k sec to the RAM but then the hard drive has to write it and the machine sorta gets stuck until the data is written.

Good to see another LCIII saved though. I had Uni recap my board and PSU awhile back. Had to save it

It was really fast, the benchmarks all showed better speeds & seek times than any HDD of the day.

 

[dJOS]

I have a SCSI2SD in my LC III. I remember it took forever to initialize using the HD setup utility. I think it took like 30+ minutes to initialize a 2gb partition. The first time I did it, I created an image of the resulting volume and moved software onto it from Basilisk, as I didn't have an external CD-ROM and had no way of moving data onto it. I ended up getting some pretty weird disk errors on that one. After re-initializing a couple more times, I think I wore out that SD card since reads/writes were really slow. I ended up getting a new SD card and I initialized it and installed System 7.5 from floppies. I still get weird freezes/crashes from time to time, I realize this could be caused by a number of things, but I am often tempted to blame scsi2sd.

If you use 7.5.3 with the newer patched disk utility it's really fast and works great with no errors. I had all sorts of issues with other versions of Mac OS and the patched utilities.

 

[dJOS]

My school had 610s as well when I was a kid. It was nostalgia for those machines that got me into the old mac hobby to begin with. It is also the reason why I got an LC III (that, and it was 15 dollars on craigslist ). I have been setting it up just like the ones at my old school, with System 7.5, Hyperstudio, and Oregon trail, and let the nostalgia begin.

Nice, I owned a Centris 610 back in the 90's with the 13" color Apple trinitron screen, it was an amazing machine.

 

[bigmessowires]

Cheers, I'm just waiting for my caps to finish it off. I've ordered Wurth Electronik aluminum polymer SMD caps rather than tantalum polymer caps so it looks more original.

Huh, somehow I'd never heard of aluminum polymer caps before, or thought it was just a different name for traditional electrolytic caps. Is this a new technology? It looks promising, and polymer means no liquid electrolyte, which means no leaky corrosive goo on your logic board 20 years from now in 2037.

 

[dJOS]

Huh, somehow I'd never heard of aluminum polymer caps before, or thought it was just a different name for traditional electrolytic caps. Is this a new technology? It looks promising, and polymer means no liquid electrolyte, which means no leaky corrosive goo on your logic board 20 years from now in 2037.

They are the latest in long life caps and when they fail they don't create a mess. They are definitely not cheap tho.

 

[djhaloeight]

It was really fast, the benchmarks all showed better speeds & seek times than any HDD of the day.

Sweet, gonna have to pick one up soon. I like using mine but the damn HD is so slow.

 

[AlpineRaven]

Not in Australia there isn't.

VERY hard to find one in Australia - either its long gone or missed the boat!, Ive got a stockpile of LCs (LC, LCII and LCIII & 475s)

Cheers

AP