Upgrading a
Macintosh LC II

The Macintosh LC II was a very minor upgrade from the original LC. Pictured above is my LC II on the left with a Color Classic, G3 All-in-One and a PowerMac 9600. The most notable difference between the LC and the LC II is the removal of the left floppy drive slot since all LC II's shipped with a hard drive in this location.

It used the same pizza box case had the same amount of maximum internal memory and had the same LC PDS slot. The only real difference was the change from a 68020 CPU running at 16MHZ to a 68030 processor running at 16MHZ. In the real world this change made no difference to the speed of the Mac.

The Apple 12" monochrome or the 12" RGB were the typical monitors that these Macs came with and were a very good fit to this form factor. Of note is a tilt swivel base for the 12" monitors that attached under the monitor and gave it some adjustability.

As with all of the LC pizza boxes there was a single PDS slot that could be populated with an ethernet card. Pictured above top is an Asante MacCON LC PDS slot card which has thin and 10T capability. Also not the socket for an FPU since the LC and LCII did not ship with one.

The bottom card is the relatively rare Farallon Etherwave LC card which allowed you to daisy chain 10T linked Macs in the same manner as AppleTalk via the serial port though at ethernet speeds. Note also the FPU socket.

Another version of LC PDS slot ethernet cards only supported thin coax and a final version from Apple itself only had an AAUI socket so you were also required to purchase an adaptor to hook up to a 10T or thin network!

The LC II supported a maximum of 10mb of ram even with two 4mb simms installed and the onboard 4mb of ram. The same limitation that the original LC had. For more information check out the page on the Quadra 605. There was also a slot for a vram upgrade on this motherboard.

Comments? Feel free to e-mail me at kevino@newsroom.net.