my poor little iMac

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doug-doug the mighty's picture
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my poor little iMac

I am so frustrated with this machine. I love it and want to keep it. I want to make it more than it started out as. But I am always stymied by something. The problem is (if you have not followed this saga) that the screen keeps going to sleep (goes black, power button goes yellow), but the CPU does not (I can do things like click on start apps, continue playing iTunes, and even shut down/restart the computer).

Everyone says that the problem is the analog board (not to mention the smart-asses who have nothing nice to say about the Rev A iMac, especially one's trying to run X), but these problems only ever present themselves under OS X, indicating a software issue. But the other side of the coin is that I have updated firmware and am right now running vanilla X.2 (just the core OS and the BSD installed, nothing else and now settings applied beyond the bare minimum for networking on a fresh 4GB drive).

I have been wanting (for a very long time) to replace the CRT and analog board with a 14" LCD recovered from a Lombard/Pismo, in hopes of getting away from this problem (and producing a cool hack).

I really want to run X on this machine, but it seems that this machine has other ideas.

I could always make it a really sweet Classic machine, but some of the apps I love are not there like Mail (not OE, Mail) and Safari.

I do not expect replies to this, I just really needed to rant.

--DDTM

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im sorry to hear that. maybe

im sorry to hear that. maybe turn it into a iman on atx hack?

i dunno, about using a lcd from a laptop though, thats prertty much a dont even ask about iot territory,(there completely incompatible unless you wanna blow $$$ on a fancy converter)

but try somethin fun with it, just back up your HD first!

eric

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yeah...

...not to big on the ATX hacks even though my Quadra 950 hack is conceptually the same. I had already figured out that I need a VGA-LCD adapter that supports LVDS to pull the CRT hack off, but the expense is the obstacle for that route. I was toying with the idea of taking a stand-alone LCD display and then recasing it in the iMac case and then just adapting the iMac's video connector to fit the plug of the display, thus bypassing the direct mobo connection route and loosing the elegance of the hack in the process.

Right now I am trying to rebuild the boot partition from a old snapshot of the drive. The machine is turned upside down with the mobo on top and all connections made and a second hard drive plugged into the IDE in order to accomplish this. If I can clean up the partition, I may give it that one last shot, but after this, I will most likely be a Classic machine.

--DDTM

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Re: my poor little iMac

(not to mention the smart-asses who have nothing nice to say about the Rev A iMac, especially one's trying to run X)

It may seem "smart-assish", but... when it comes to the early iMacs, all those nasty remarks have some pretty solid basis in fact. As should be painfully obvious by now.

The kindest description I can think of for those machines is they're a bit like those little MG, Triumph, and Fiat convertibles that were popular through the 1960s and 1970s. They were cute and fun, and well-loved by their owners (to a point). They were also cheaply built, had cruddy quality control, and were terribly individualistic and unreliable mechanically. ("Individualistic" meaning from car to car there were quirks in the construction or parts used which might make one car run fine under some conditions where another "identical" one fails miserably.) They were cute cars, and fun cars, but they weren't by most measures Good cars.

You're asking a Rev. A iMac to be a good computer. Good luck.

--Peace

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well put, sir

That was probably one of the best ways of putting the matter and one of the hardest to contest. My remark was more to the folks who say that the best purpose any early iMac could serve is as a boat acnhor and that this iteration of the Mac was worthless, etc. (this is paraphrased sentiments, of course).

I have to agree with your statements, and until I can hack the machine to a more stable and robust incarnation, I must be frustrated.

Thanks!

--DDTM

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Currently, a new 15" LCD disp

Currently, a new 15" LCD display will likely be cheaper then the LCD-VGA adaptor and cable and PS and... approach. If you like the iMac case. maybe just do the LCD convertion and maybe even the ATX PS convertion in the iMac case, then you'll have a very reliable iMac. I have a Rev A iMac at 233 OC to 300 with a bigger fan-cooled heatsink in an ATX case and external monitor. It been running 10.3 solidly for almost a year now.

The amount of RAM makes a big different in stability. I got a 128 and a 256 in there for a total of 384.

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.

I am running 512MB RAM on mine. I was waiting to OC until I got 10.2.8 stable.

So far the only real expense on this machine wasthe 120GB hard drive, the new IDE cable (for hooking two drives up), and the RAM. So it has not yet become a money pit, but you are right to bring up the cost effectiveness of this. (Not that it changes my desire to do it any.)

--DDTM

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