Mel's Macintosh Universe: The Power Center 150
Mel's Macintosh Universe

Mel's Power Center 150
One of the Greatest Macs Apple Never Made

Power Center 150
The Power Computing Power Center 150 Mini-Tower and 17 inch monitor.
From Power Computing

_____________________

I bought my Power Center 150 in May of 1997. Back then the future of Power Computing looked very bright. They made the best, and most affordable Power Macintosh clones. I had for several months considered buying a Power Mac and looked at the options offered by Apple, Power and other clone vendors. I settled on Power Computing mainly because they had the best computer for the right price. My choices was to go with either the Power Center or Apple Power Mac 7300. After looking at the features of both boxes, I decided that Power offered the best option.

The computer that I bought was offered through Power Computing's promotion which included the Power Center 150 mini tower, keyboard, mouse, 32 megs of RAM, 15" multi-media monitor, Apple Mac OS 7.6 and Power's famous bundled software package. The bundle certainly beat anything Apple offered at the time. Since this machine was a "build to order box" I had Power add the internal Iomega Zip Drive. I could have bought more ram, another hard drive and stuff too, but money was tight.

My Power Center 150 was assembled on May 14, 1997 and shipped to me about a week after that. Power provided customers with a sheet that among other things told them when the CPU was built.

Since my purchase, Steve Jobs, "temporary" CEO of Apple Computer decided to end Macintosh cloning and bought out Power Computing's Mac license. In essence Mr. Jobs killed Macintosh cloning and all the wonderful things it did to bring people into the fold of affordable Hi-end based Macintosh computers.

Despite the stroke of bad luck that hit Power, I have managed to keep my PowerCenter 150 operating fairly well, despite a few horror stories I have heard from other Power Computing owners. The PowerCenter serves me well in its capacity to handle many desktop publishing projects, web page building, data base management and financial tracking. I'm currently running Mac OS8 as the main operating system and sometimes run the Be OS PR2 on this machine. The computer is networked to 3 other Macintoshes, the SE, IIsi and a recently acquired Quadra 610. It's fast enough for web surfing, though if I got a cable connection, I suspect things would be even faster.

BACK TO MEL's POWERCENTER 150


_____________________

Top | Return the PowerCenter Page

Copyright 1998-2000 by Melvin Ah Ching Productions. Last update to this page: September 17, 2000.