What to do with my 2011 21.5'' iMac with a bad LCD?

I try not to bug this community very often but I really need some advice.

I purchased it Mid 2011 and this past summer the Applecare expired. Just recently the LCD started acting up and two lines have formed across the screen. I took it to the Apple store today and was told it would cost around $500 to replace the LCD. Even the genius agreed that it wasn't worth paying that price since its almost half of a new iMac.

I've invested quite a bit of money into my mac including adding 16GBs of RAM and installing a 128GB SSD.

Should I sell it on Craigslist? How much would I get for it with the bad LCD?

Here are the specs for my iMac: 21'' 2.7 GHz i5, 16 GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 128GB SSD.

i checked Apple's recycling program and I would only get $580 :/ essentially the price of the LCD!

Roy G Biv said:

Hook an external monitor up and stash the iMac away.

Click to expand...

Hmm. Not a bad idea.

dtjay7 said:

If you decide to sell it, I have an iMac with a bad logic board that would work well with it.

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Insane how much a logic board will cost you. Might as well buy a new iMac. I don't think I would want to sell mine for less than $1000.

Yeah I think I will end up doing this. The iMac works great but those lines look pretty bad. I'll just suck it up.