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Macintosh SE question

A

Apostrophe

6502
Hi,

A few weeks ago I acquired a Macintosh SE from eBay. It's an awesome Mac, and doesn't seem to have anything at all wrong with it. These 20-year-old Macs are much better than most people give them credit for.

But I've never had a Compact Mac before this (I didn't even know they existed until last year) and so I have a question. Every time I try starting a program on the SE, it loads it--after almost a full minute/minute and a half. I don't have any problems with this at all, but I just wanted to know if it's normal behavior.

Thanks,

-Apostrophe

 
What programs are you trying to load? It shouldn't take a full minute to load much of anything. Also, what system are you running? How about RAM, etc.

 
It depends. TeachText probably takes somewhere around 30 seconds, but Microsoft Word takes a bit longer. The SE has 1 MB RAM, Mac OS 6.0.4, (or is it 6.0.8? Can't remember), has a 20 MB hard drive, and was manufactured in '88.

How long does it usually take to load programs on an SE?

 
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1 meg isn't much! I'd go over to the Trading Post section and get the computer up to 4mb. Microsoft Word is dreadfully slow on these Macs. If you want a good word processor I'd go for WriteNow 3 or 4. If you can't find it, let me know.

6.0.8 should buzz right along with 4mb. Welcome to classic Macs! There's a lot of character in these little machines.

BTW - 30 seconds isn't bad for TeachText. Maybe someone else will chime in with a different experience.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks, I'll try and get a hold of more RAM. To do that, of course, I'll need the proper Torx-15 screwdriver that I keep hearing about.

When I said 1 MB of RAM, that's at least what it says on the outside of the Mac. Next time I boot it up I'll see for sure.

But anyway, thanks for your suggestions.

-Apostrophe

 
Since you have a classic Mac you may want to pick up one of the long torx screwdrivers. BUT, I managed to find mine at Sears. I've bought a few from them and I suspect you'll find one at yours as well. Those aren't a big deal to hunt down.

If you have other programs on the SE test 'em out. If it's slow accessing the HD or opening windows that's another problem.

Either way, the hard part is over! You got your Mac from an eBayer who successfully packed a CRT computer well enough for it not to be damaged. Good times are ahead!

It sounds like you've done your net homework but if you haven't found Macintosh Garden, they've got a lot of abandonware games that are fun to try out.

 
I think that 60 or 90 seconds to launch a System 6 application is excessive, and indicates a hardware problem (dodgy hard disk) or a system software problem (install a fresh copy of 6.0.7 or 6.0. 8) . I doubt whether a RAM upgrade will improve your situation.

In 1993, we were considering our network options for Macs at work. The case for ethernet was not conclusive at that time -- System 7 was relatively new and most applications and data sets were small -- so we had to consider LocalTalk networking as an option. I'd only just joined the section and a colleague was already well into developing a benchmark, which included MacX as well as native Mac apps. My boss is a data hoarder so he will still have a copy of the report, no doubt; my rusty recollection is that Word 5.1 launched from a SCSI disk in less than 20 seconds and from a beefy NetWare server over LocalTalk in about 80 seconds. Launching Word 5.1 from a server over ethernet was roughly equivalent to launching from a local SCSI disk. Running graphical Unix apps in MacX over LocalTalk was painful.

Our conclusion (wisely) was to drop LocalTalk for future network developments.

Apostrophe: reformat that disk, install a fresh copy of System 6, and your SE will fly.

 
REVISION OF FIGURES: I booted the SE (it's still on, in case I need to test anything else). Microsoft Word 4 took 1 minute 45 seconds, whereas TeachText took 10 seconds.

And also, the SE has 4 MB of RAM.

So I guess that a re-installation of the system will do some good. But, tell me, how does a re-installation help? I mean, I know it does, since the Centris 610 needed one, too, but how does re-installing an OS help? Do OSes expire?

Thanks,

-Apostrophe

 
No, but if you find things are becoming excessively slow, then a fresh reinstall will do good.

 
it helps, belive it, all deleted files and preferences are somewhere on the disk but in other format like "00000" all over the disk plate and the head of a disk must jump all over the place to load a application ... and all information of icns and stuff is stored in invisible file called desktop DB or DF whatever ... and you fell better when you do a clean install

 
I mean, I know it does, since the Centris 610 needed one, too, but how does re-installing an OS help? Do OSes expire?
Click to expand...
Yes, they acquire cruft after a bit of time. In the Mac world, this typically means that an application leaves something unobtrusive in the System Folder that is difficult to detect.

An extreme, non-Mac example: the university where I worked had 170 (lousy) PCs in a user area. On a weekly basis, three or four were returned for re-imaging of Windows XP, which was a much greater proportion than on other more standard PCs. So I conducted an experiment. I configured one PC to boot, logon as a domain user, launch some applications, reboot and repeat. For a month. After that time, free disk space had fallen from 20GB to 20MB, and the OS itself used more RAM (not a huge figure more). Boot up times over that period degraded by 50%. When free disk space hit 20MB, I ran it for another week, expecting the PC to fall over. However, it continued to run, suggesting that XP has some sort of scavenging mechanism in such circumstances.

 
Ok, awesome. Final question, then: Where can I get Mac OS 6.0.8 in 800k floppy disks?

I've been surfing around, but couldn't find them. Any good websites for this?

-Apostrophe

 
It's tricky without another Mac - and the SE (I believe) is 800k. If you want 6.0.8 floppies I can send you a set. Just PM me.

 
With a 800k drive Mac the most important tools are

(a) another mac that can either read/write 800k disks

( B) another mac that can connect via localtalk

© stuffit expander or anything else that can decode BinHex 4.0 files.

 
If you have (a) you don't really need ( B) and vice versa.

What is Localtalk?

Any Mac with an inbuilt (not external USB) floppy will be able to write 800k disks, up to and including the "Beige" G3 models.

Most floppy Macs will quite happily read PC formatted 1.4MB disks, though. If you're lucky, even an SE. You can use these disks to transfer disk images from a PC. (NB exactly as downloaded from the net - ie do not attempt to uncompress them) Then use your Mac to create the floppies from the images.

Unfortunately PC floppy drives are physically incapable of reading, writing or formatting 800k Mac floppies.

 
... Every time I try starting a program on the SE, it loads it--after almost a full minute/minute and a half. I don't have any problems with this at all, but I just wanted to know if it's normal behavior.
Click to expand...
The Mac's present slowness is almost undoubtably attributable to the quality of housekeeping by former owner(s). The file directory and files on the drive have the potential, after umpteen years, to be considerably fragmented if no attention has been paid to that. NUM (Norton Utilities for Mac), although I do not know which version is necessarily the best (it will be 3.2 or lower) will defragment and optimize the drive at the same time as it sorts the file types into directory, System, CPs, Extensions, documents and so on and reassembles the fragments contiguously. That will save the SE a lot of thrashing of its HDD during loading of the far-flung fragments of files into memory, and consequently, much time in doing so.

If you have the means to do so, merely copying the contents of the drive to another drive, and then back again, can achieve the same effect but at the cost of more time and two transfers.

de

 
I recommend you also look for a utility called Disinfectant. It's a freeware anti-virus tool. If your system is that slow there may be a resource hog in the background.

 
So you all agree that reformatting the hard drive can definitely help. You also agree that I need to use another Mac to connect via LocalTalk, download the operating system, write the 800k floppies, and put them into the SE. But what if I just connected the SE to the internet?

But I probably won't do anything to the SE for a while, not unless I encounter an actual problem. I'm sure that reformatting the drive and doing an OS re-installation would get rid of all the 'software junk' and I'll definitely look into that, but it's really not a problem for me to wait a minute and a half for Microsoft Word to load up. I will, however, try and gradually gather up what is needed to get an OS re-installation. And in the meantime, at the top of my To Do list is looking for 800k/720k floppy disks. I know that they're not quite as common these days, and it might be wise to get them in abundance now to avoid going to extra trouble later.

But thanks for all your help, since I know that it would probably be a good idea sometime to do a re-installation to make it easier for the SE to load programs.

-Apostrophe

 
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