Just got a Macintosh SE, whats the best OS

[Surfheart]

I just picked up an SE from Ebay with a 20Mb hard drive and 4Mb RAM.

It's currently running System 7, but feels a little sluggish compared to my Macintosh Plus.

I was wondering what the optimal OS is to run on these?

 

[Scott Baret]

System 6 will dramatically improve your performance. Apple has three versions on their website; you'll probably want 6.0.8. It's not a bad idea to keep 7.x around for compatibility reasons, but it is far more demanding on the hardware.

An SE will actually go back to 4.x, although Apple doesn't have systems that old on their website. (It's also possible to run older versions on SE, but they're not officially supported).

 

[Surfheart]

Thanks alot Scott. I think I've got a partial System 6 disk somewhere at home, hopefully that will be enough to get the system up and running.

I don't currently have a way to create floppies from an image file.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

6.0.8 is da bomb on an SE, especially with a Radius16 inside! :approve:

 

[Mk.558]

System 6.0.8 runs just dandy. System 7.0.1 can also be okay, but takes a performance hit. You should have it in case you need to run any System 7 applications.

Power it up here.

I don't currently have a way to create floppies from an image file.

Download CompactPro. Split into segments if required. Then copy to the SE and rejoin. Use Disk Copy 6.3.3 if you have access to a machine 7.0.1 equipped or later. If not, use Disk Copy 4.2.

If I was near my Mac collection, all you'd have to do is shout and I'd have a pair of floppies in the mail your way, but I can't.

If you are stuck with 800KB floppies, then I'd pick up an SE/30 or maybe something like a IIcx that can handle both 800KB disks and 1.44MB floppies. A IIfx would be the hot pickles, since it has dual floppy drives. (40MHz doesn't hurt either.) As your model appears to be a FDHD, you should be fine though.