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mac mini and and old mac display question

M

munchmime

macrumors member
Original poster
I have my old imac g3 500 sitting at my parents house so my sisters can use it for their school work, and my parents for email.

The older of my 2 sisters has an ibook g3 500 also, but she now needs a a dvd-r drive and little more power for school projects. Of course she is strapped for cash. She cant run to my house every day to get her work done, and asked if it were possible to buy a mac mini, and use the imac as a display for it.

So here I am, wondering if this could be done, especially without using the firewire port.

Any help would be great - disabling the cd drive, and HD on the imac wouldn't be a factor, I just don't want to go ripping the imac apart to find out it can't be done, or that there was an easier way of doing it.

If not, I guess she'll have to find a decent used monitor.

Thanx,
- Munch
 
munchmime said:
Any help would be great - disabling the cd drive, and HD on the imac wouldn't be a factor, I just don't want to go ripping the imac apart to find out it can't be done, or that there was an easier way of doing it.
Click to expand...
Without some major surgery, I doubt it. Then again, if you like soldering, you might be able to find the RGBHV pins from a VGA cable leading into the iMac's monitor and solder them to a VGA able that you buy and cut an end off of. You can look here for the pinouts. A little scary though, poking around the back of a CRT monitor, I hope you know what you're doing. Heck, if you were really motivated, you could probably fit a Mac Mini completely inside of a CRT iMac...if you wanted to for some depraved reason. I'm waiting to see someone mount one inside a Mac Classic case, that's be fun 🙂
 
Like HiRez said, in short, no. You would be MUCH better off selling the iMac for whatever you can get for it (must be worth at least $150 still, right?) and buying the best display you can get for the money.

You can get a nice CRT display for $150 (at least 17" and likely 19" if you shop around). For under $200 you can get a 15" LCD, and for under $235 you can go to a 17" LCD.

So buy a mini, sell the iMac, get a new display and call it a day. Would be much better (and better looking) than trying to reused the integrated display in any Mac.

Rob

EDIT: Just check eBay really quick, and iMac G3 500mhz sysytems are sellign for anything from $175 to $300+ depending on condition, software, memory, etc. The $225 -250 range seems prettey average, though. You could easily get a nice LCD display to go with a Mini for that.
 
Thank You.

thank you very much. it's too much work, perhaps if I had a better reason I might try, but I'm not fond of that much work, especially with resale so high still, and the fact it's not at my house to use 😀. also thank you for checking ebay for the prices, I did that also, but it's nice to know people go that extra step here.

alas, I will probably suggest that she (my sister) put up her iBook, and I'll put up the iMac, load them both with great software, and she can use that money towards the mini and a monitor.


Thank You again,
-Munch
 
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