With all the hullabaloo about the Mac IIfx, there has been much discussion from jealous Plus and SE owners on how to bring their Macs up to speed and snuff. One such option mentioned is a $449 Dove 68030 upgrade for the Plus and SE, although the Dove board only gives about 25% speed increase. The main focus of Dove's upgrade is compatibility with System 7.0's virtual memory.

A speedier alternative is the Mercury upgrade with the optional accelerator card from Total Systems, which can speed up a Plus or SE by 200-300%. The Mercury upgrade also has even more options as well, so you can add a 68882 coprocessor, some SCSI enhancement for Pluses, large monitor (Apple, Samsung, and Radius) support, and a memory card which also provides a RAM cache card. Of course, by the time you stuff all that into your Mac, Apple will come out with an SE/40 upgrade path. The only price information from Usenet on this system is that the initial board will cost $500, the optional accelerator card will be $50, and the 32-bit RAM card will be $300. These prices are only good until April 30th, which is likely to be in the past by the time you read this. Sorry.

Total Systems -- 800/874-2288

Information from:
Christopher Lye -- clye@phoenix.princeton.edu