Well figure I'd share this story, perhaps someone has had this problem... Ok I'm married with children and I work as a digital prepress/graphic designer for a four color print shop....
It was easy to justify anything I needed for my computer back when I was still doing graphic/web design on the side but now that I do it full time I DON"T want to do any on the side stuff.... so now my home computers are for entertainment and education for the kids. This being said my way of moving up the mac scale is I watch E-bay and if I get a good deal I buy it then put the piece its replacing up for bid. Through this pattern I've went through many Nubus and PCI macs with various G3 cards and video cards but now I've finally got a "i" family, a Bondi iMac for my wife and my Blueberry 350 iMac and my work has bought me a iBook 800 that travels from home to work with me. I got my 350 on Ebay where it was listed as having a blurry screen..... well I figured I could fix it so I got it.... and almost got my butt kicked for the first time by a mac. If you break a slot loader down, which if you are going real far you should do a google search and find the pdfs on how to do that.... the CRT can kill ya if yer not careful. But there is a black box on the left side as you face it... with two phillips screw type knobs on it.... one controls brightness and the other controls focus. Then behind the top of the CRT there is a plastic box with 3 potentiometers.... Through a combination of turning those potentiometers and turning the 6 rings at the base of the CRT I was able to get the electron guns aligned again. I think whoever had it before me had tried this and screwed it up. Once again this is not for the light hearted and you should never use both hands at the same time in case you do shock yourself... but the end result is I had a pretty clear screen where as you looked at it the left side bowed in... oh about a half inch.... and everything seemed kind of smudged to the right. Just for the heck of it I loaded Jaguar and noticed it changed slightly. Then I went back and did the firmware updates on it and erased the hard drive and reloaded Jaguar and its perfect now. The item was listed as a lease turn in.... probably whoever had it tried to put X on there without updating the firmware and messed it up.... I'm pretty sure the company who was selling it was the one who tweaked all the guns out of alignment since they put a sticker on it and said that it couldn't be returned if the sticker was broken.... I mean of course I'm going to try and fix something that was as bad as the way I first got it. My heart sunk when I powered it up the first time and it was so messed up.... so I think they screwed up the guns and couldn't figure out how to fix em... so more than likely all that needed to be done was the firmware update. The long and short of it is... I got the computer for $125 less than they usually sell for on Ebay and if someone hadn't have messed with it all it needed was a firmware update to fix the bowed in video. Your milage may vary ;D but thats my story. Matt Current Stable of Macs.. Bondi Rev B iMac G3/233 Blueberry iMac G3/350 iBook G3/800 -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> 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/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
