Thank you for your comments.

To address point #1: The problem with trying to use the monitor, just as a remote monitor, is problematic. The drive circuits are off of the main logic card. So, I haven’t heard of anyone doing that.

To address point #2: I don’t think that is a realistic possibility, given point #1,

Cool about the SSD. I wish these were cheaper.

Regards,

Jim

Thank you for the great information! I have used your training to repair several flat-panel monitors, system board, etc., by replacing visibly bad capacitors.

On my plate at the moment is an older iMac G5 PPC (20″, 1.8 GHz, 2 Gig Ram) that is still usable, although very quickly becoming obsolete in the WEB environments. It has the bulging capacitors on the system board, but still works fine. The owner suffered a hard drive failure and gave me the unit after I recovered her data from it. I have put a 128 Gig SSD (GSkil 2.5″) I had laying around in it and reinstalled the OS and applications.

With the SSD it runs GREAT! It’s fast enough that it’s a real shame to discard the unit. So I’ve decided to go ahead and replace all the capacitors on the system board and the power supply. Later I may disassemble the unit and sell it for parts. Until then… Two ideas have come up with this unit and I haven’t found anything online addressing them:

1) What would it take to make an adapter cable to wire directly into the monitor so it can be used as “just a monitor” for another machine? I guessing opening up one of Apple’s other 20″ “monitor only” units would clue me in, but I don’t have access to one.

2) I would love to gut the inside of this unit and install a generic Intel laptop or micro board in there. I imagine I could find a newer iMac G5 with an Intel board and perform a swap, but that’s probably going to being pricey at best.

Do you have any experience or advice on these two ideas?

I am thankful for all the service you’ve provided to us!

Thanks,

David George
IT Consultant
Houston, TX

See my iMac Do-it-Yourself repairs articles for more information.

Great site!

I've been using the screen spanning doctor for a couple of years now on my iMac G5 1.8ghz (ambient light version).

But a few months ago, the second monitor, a Mitsubishi Diamondcrysta RDT156V went dark. It was still powered on, and detected on the imac under displays, but it was dark.

I couldn't see anything, so I don't think it was simply the backlight (which you can usually see something faintly). I figured it was the monitor. But then it came on. It did this a few times, on for a few hours, then off again.

Restarts, resetting pram, nvram, etc. had no effect. nor did reinstalling and uninstalling spandoctor several times.

i was ready to pick up a new monitor, since the mitsubishi was about 5 years old and I figured it was just not up to the task anymore, but then I tried it on my trusty Pismo. It worked! And is working still. no flicker, no darkening, not even once.

so i plugged it back into my imac and no good. still dark. hmm. So, i assume I must have done something to my logic board on my imac for it to not display on the second monitor. The main monitor on the imac is fine. no probs at all. never had any. but the second monitor when plugged in, is recognized in displays, detected with all the options listed, but is dark. This is true of mirroring and no mirroring.

It's getting the signal, but remains dark. I then guessed it might be the VGA to MiniVGA connector since I heard they are finicky and I've had to replace one in the past already. Replaced it. No change.

I'm stumped.

Any clues? I'm resigned to thinking it's a logic board prob on the imac.