> I only have the unit itself and the keyboard - no mouse, but I decided to > power it up anyway. Digging up an old power cord I had, I plugged it in and > turned it on and.... not much happened. : ( > > Sure there was a beep or two and some humming, but the only thing I saw on > the screen was a single-pixel white line down the center of the screen. > This seemed bad. Is the screen kaput? I don't know.
Unfortunately, the screen adjustment holes you mentioned won't help you in this situation, and for the time being are best left alone. The most likely culprit for this is bad solder joints on the analogue board. Since you're new to Macs of this genre, the analogue board is the large, vertically mounted circuit board which sits on the left hand side of the Mac (facing the font). This is the board with the adjustment holes. If you take off the sheet of plastic that covers the outer side of this circuit board, you'll see that it is covered with little blobs of molten metal which are used to connect all the components (on the other side of the board) to the wiring of the board itself. These are the solder joints. All of this will make much more sense when you take a look for yourself. Because the Plus has no fan, they tend to get very hot over time, which causes these joints to degrade. The joints that usually die are the ones that hold the connectors (to which the wires from the screen itself plug into) Bad joints are often apparent because they are either dull in appearance or show faintly visible cracks - usually running in rings around the joint's centre. To fix them, you'll need to get a soldering iron (Radio Shack will have them). You can probably just get away with using the iron to simply remelt the solder, then leaving it to set, though if you want to do a more thorough job, I'd suggest you pick up a solder sucker, rosin flux and solder (I use rosin core 60/40 tin/lead) while you're at Radio Shack. Once you get all this home, you'd find the bad joints, suck the old solder off, and put some new one on. All of this sounds a lot more complicated than it really is, so don't worry. I'd suggest you look at the FAQ, whose address appears at the bottom of each list message for more advice. Not only will you find some basic soldering instructions, but also the labels of those joints which tend to go bad which makes them easier to find. Once you've done all that, the screen should function fine. Go crack open a beer to celebrate - hell, have the whole six-pack, you've earned it. Now that the screen is working, you'll see that once you turn on the Mac, after a few seconds, you'll get an icon of a disk with a flashing '?'. This is the Mac telling you that it needs a boot disk if you plan on actually doing anything with it. You need either a bootable double-density floppy, or external SCSI hard disk. The FAQ can tell you where to get the appropriate System software, assuming you can get some double density disks, and another Mac capable of reading them - the PTPro will do this if you still have it. If all of this seems a little too pointless, then the Mac Plus does make a fine fish tank... Cheers, Adam. -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
