I have an old Imac I was given a few years ago. I had thought maybe learning some about mac should I ever have to support them. I learned some, but the OS is so old not worth getting much into. The system takes about 2 min just to boot, about 40sec of that is the mac bios. I'm considering just junking it because is so old, and now can run mac-OS on PC in a VM.

I came up with ide, if possible could be cool to try. I would like to pull the big CRT out, and put in a LCD monitor. The issue is though that my unit lacks VGA. Looks like there is a spot for one, but the port, and some SMD passive parts are missing.

There is one port that goes up to display, and runs into the board at the back of the tube. From looks of the motherboard there is nothing special about this, and looks like may be VGA. They use a 20pin connector though, so not sure A: this is actually VGA, B what pin is what.

I don't know anybody would know this unless they worked for apple, but thought was worth a try. I would think the signal wires should be fairly simple to find, but not sure would be of use.

Some specs if it helps:
Imac 350MHZ/512K l2, 64MB ram, 6GB HDD, 24X cd, 56 k modem
Motherboard 820-1051-A, (c) 1999, hu947077rhka p7 mlb,350mhz,64mb

I'd just like to try this I have some old LCD displays I was able to fix people gave me I could use, thought I may try. If this is something that's not possible to do let me know. Maybe a usb adaptor would work, but I don't have much hope in it even being recognized by osX tiger.

 

The "big CRT" is 13.8". So basically 14". I would not bother with doing the mod.

Just max out the ram, load OS 10.3.9 (or you can try 10.4) and use it.

 

Ok I kind of wondered if even LCD would fit. most I have now are 17 in. I was messing around with a little bit, seemed possibly a little smaller. I meant big more as in space/weight than screen size. I'm fairly tempted to just scrap it out.

even with ram upgrade to 256 MB still runs quite sluggishly, That I know of there's no software or anything I'd have interest in using that only runs on Power PC systems. Most things don't even seem to have option for that anymore. Only possible use I could see are maybe some basic stuff like music, maybe videos and surfing. Even at 1024X768 resolution, and millions of colors the graphics still look pretty poor. Part of reason I wanted to try LCD, and see if I could, and make it kind of portable since has handle and is an all in one unit.

 

Well, it looks like the max for you is 1 GB, so get two 512 MB RAM modules. I did a RAM upgrade on my iBook G3, got RAM from Amazon pretty cheap.

I assume you have a slot cd drive, here is instructions: http://www.sterpin.net/uk/imacslotinuk.htm

The websites say 15" CRT with 13.8" viewable area.