iMac goodness and other fun stuff.

Last weekend I was at ole S.E. and found an iMac that everyone claimed was "dead". Unabashed by the claims made by everyone there and lured by the $10 "get it off our pallets, please" price (actually they like Macs there, they sell for a better price...) I took it home. Turns out it needed good RAM, and a good PRAM battery to even try to boot. Then, I found out that the CD-ROM was borked. Apparently the magnetic retainer ring got dislodged, presumably when whomever killed the iMac went to retrieve their OS X CD. You see, it appears that along with all the troubles this iMac had to begin with, someone tried to do an OS X install, and didn't RTFM enough to update the firmware first. Luckily the CD-ROM was easily fixable, and I had a 6.4GB laptop drive sitting around, just asking for OS X and YDL. :mac: After that I figgered out that the USB keyboard I was using has a phantom mouse-with-the-button-pressed issue that caused it to always eject the CDs. So, when I finally got the CD-ROM to take a CD, I found out that the previously intermittant-video-at-boot became no-video-at-boot. On my own I played and played, and found out that if you wait for the iMac to boot from the OS 9 CD fully, then press the power button, the iMac will sleep, just like it should. Great, so what? you ask. Well, when you wake up the iMac, bingo!, you have video again, albiet in any number of random borked modes that might be good enough to let you see what you are doing. So it's a partition and installfest, then a download and an attempt to update the firmware. BUT, *I* failed to RTFM, and discovered that it takes OS 9.*1* to update the FW. Well, I was lucky enough to have the 9.1 update on another machine so I wouldn't have to d/l the 70MB overdialup. Updated 9.1, ran the FW update, and saw the magical glory of full, clear video on the iMac. :macos: Now it was on to installing OS X, whch went without a hitch. :coolmac: Then onto YDL 3.0, which has it's issues with the video cuttng out when you logout of X Windows. Blum 3 And yesterday I got an offer of 128MB DRAM for it for $5 from Jack. Acute That means I can stick a 64MB DIMM back in the Celery Stick and have 196MB RAM in the iMac, which should help with OS X a bit. X on 128MB isn't bad, but more is much better, as my iBook is great with 640MB. Now I just need a set of the HK internal speaks that the lUser cut out when they were trying to get their HDD out of the iMac.