In my last post I talked about the “new” iMac G5 I’d acquired (knowing something was wrong) that had one of the well known/documented graphics card failures. After making that post I ordered a refurbished motherboard from The Bookyard (vintage Apple heaven) but before fitting it, we thought we’d try heating the chip up to see if re-flowing it would achieve anything, I mean hey, we can’t make it any worse…right?

Well, after a couple of attempts we achieved……nothing. Actually, I think we made it worse? Oh well, on to fitting the new board!

The G5 is an extremely simple machine to work on which is good thing considering how many common faults they have!

Tadaa! It all works! It booted right into the last users system which was jarring, they’d left everything on there. It was very clearly a family computer that at one point just got parked (when the chip went bad I assume).

Around this time was when I remembered it’s not (easily) possible to boot PowerPC Macs from USB and considering the SuperDrive in this just seem to keep spitting the disks back out, I had to employ the use of one of our iMac G4s and head into Target Disk Mode. See! Hoarding all these old Macs does have its uses!

Picked up an iMac G5 for dirt cheap that was listed as powering up but not outputting anything on screen, now I know the G5 had a laundry list of issues they suffered over the years but as this was a great price and came with it’s original box and accessories it was hard to pass up!

This might be one of the easiest iMacs to open ever, three clever captive screws at the bottom and the back pops off. Before opening it up I powered it on and got the single beep which normally indicates something is amiss with the RAM and lo-and-behold, it doesn’t have any! After a quick eBay search I managed to order some replacement RAM.

Whilst inside I was pleasantly surprised to see none of the capacitors looked like they were ready to party (in a bad way) which seems to be a very common fault on these boards. One of the other common faults is faulty graphics chips (specifically the soldering I believe)…

…ah bollocks.

Well, as I can’t make it any worse, it’s time to disassemble and see if we can re-flow the graphics chip. Watch this space!

This weeks new (old) purchase was a 2006 Mac Pro (1,1) complete with a 20″ Cinema Display, keyboard and mouse. Great price for a well looked after machine and the fact the Cinema Display comes with it’s power supply is a big bonus, those things seem to be like gold dust on eBay!

I remember how unattainable these seemed when they came out, I used to go on the Apple Configurator and see just how expensive I could make these (actually, I still do that…). Always wanted one and finally found one that came up at a great price within a reasonable distance of me.

…actually “one” is a slight lie, I now have two of them

The one on the left is also a 1,1 and did work when I got it, but shortly after when plugging it back in some time later something went *pop*. I assume it’s the power supply that’s kicked the bucket so a new one is on the way and if not, time to take it apart!

Always wanted a black MacBook (“BlackBook”) back in 2006, now I’ve finally managed to find one in great (working) condition 14 years later! Super hard to find one of these that doesn’t look like it’s been dragged behind a car and gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson at a half reasonable price. This one seems to be all working (aside from a missing caps lock key which I ended up getting from a donor machine) and a completely dead (but original) battery. Now complete with Mac OSX Leopard (Dear Apple, please bring back the old intros ????).