[Mutant]

Well, just my luck!

My G4 Cube died a few weeks ago, and I'm unemployed so rather than spend an indeterminate amount of cash on a repair, I opted to go for acquiring a cheap replacement (of some kind), and get the Cube fixed later.

Today I came across a PC dealer that had a bunch of "as is" iMacs (and other Macs) that he'd acquired at a liquidation sale.

I booted an iMac, ran system profiler, tested the CRDOM drive, and finally decided to purchase a clean, 1999 G3 iMac for 250 pounds (eBay had them going for about 300 to 350). So far so good.

Got it home, reformatted the hard drive, dropped on 9.2 then OS X. Still no problems.

Added extra memory, ran the box for a while, no problem.

Opened it one more time to add an Airport card, and upon restart the monitor was black. Never would light up.

Yanked the Airport card and extra ram, but no go. Still won't light up. Machine seems to boot ok, goes to sleep if you hit the power switch so I'm assuming the monitor is broken somehow.

FWIW, a piece of orangish material - sorta plastic or clay - fell out. I think its from some material around the monitor yoke.

Any tips on how to fix it? Or is this one for the dealer?

And if the latter, how much is this likely to cost?

Take care

Mutant

[ThisGuy]

first thing i would check is to make sure the brightness isn't turned all the way down, then:
�reset PRAM.

�Start up from a CD. Video?

�Update the firmware. Video?

�Press the PMU chip on the logic board with the power cord disconnected. Video?

�Check cable connections on the video board.

�Remove the CRT video board and make sure the pins are all there and are not bent.

�Connect the computer to an external monitor using the VGA monitor port at the rear of the computer. Video?

�Try putting the computer to sleep by pressing the power button. The LED pulses to indicate that the computer is in sleep. Wake the computer. Video?

�Remove all SDRAM and let the computer sit for two minutes. Reinstall SDRAM, plug in the computer, and start it up. Video?

That is a start. Please try these and report your findings.

[vmarks]

only don't update the firmware (that step number 2 or 3 above) so quickly-
first of all, it's real hard to update firmware when you have no video.
Second of all, it's not going to help solve the problem because it worked before, and isn't now. I would jump straight to trying the external monitor after booting from CD and resetting PRAM and PMU.

If you think the machine hasn't been opened before, and you think that the orangey clay came from the monitor yoke (good bet) this is one for the dealer- but you should be able to get signal on the external monitor. There is no earthly reason why you'd have bent pins on the neck of the CRT if the machine has never been opened before.