My first experience with an upgrade card was the Harris Performer II card, a nice little clip on circuit board that provided a 68000 CPU at 16 MHz.

This card, I think, worked fine. My Classic became snappier with the card installed. The only problem encountered was with the Control Panel. The Control Panel had an indicator to turn the CPU "on." It never held the "on" position. Whenever the Control Panel was opened, it indicated the CPU was "off."

Next came the MicroMac Multispeed Accelerator, what should have been the best of the best. Sadly, my mileage varied. These boards, that fit over and under the Classic's logic board, came with everything: a 68030 CPU at 32 MHz, a 68882 FPU at 32 MHz, and 16 MB of RAM.

When I first got the cards in August 2000, I had some trouble installing them myself. When installed, I couldn't get the machine to boot. MicroMac determined one of the boards was defective and had me send it in to be repaired. When I got the boards back, I took my Classic and the boards to a qualified Macintosh service center for installation. This time, one of the boards started burning. The technician contacted MicroMac and was told that part of the board was not needed anyway. Still having trouble, my technician was told that MicroMac would perform the installation and would be in touch.

We have yet to be contacted; I will contact MicroMac myself soon.

Next, I tried the Applied Engineering Transwarp Card. This clip on 25 MHz 68030 was quite impressive. My Classic was amazingly fast, faster even than my SE/30 with 32 MB of RAM.

But there was a problem: the machine would freeze whenever transferring files from one disk to another, from one disk partition to another, or over an AppleTalk network.

So, its back to the drawing board!

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