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Is our Strawberry still alive?

S

Suzy Darling

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 25, 2010
5
0
Hi, I've been looking for an answer to this all over the internet: our tray loading 266 Mhz iMac shuts down within seconds after powering it on. If I leave it unplugged for some time and connect it to the power cord again, pressing the front button will make it chime, you can hear it just start to spin it's HD, it will flash it's green light briefly and then: click, all power is turned completely off within a second or two. In this state it will respond to nothing whatsoever, it seems completely dead (there's not even the faint electric hum that it normally has when you put your ear next to it.) If I unplug the power cord and leave it unplugged for some time, I can make it briefly come alive again, but the same thing happens.
I've tried to: boot from CD, reset PRAM, start up with extensions off, replaced the battery, reset the cuda chip, no luck. Any suggestions? I'm having a hard time believing it is truly dead as long as it still chimes...
BTW: We had it running OS 8.5.1 still :) and done nothing special to it in the past weeks either.
 
Sounds like logic board and/or power supply failure, so there's nothing you can do to fix it :( (you could replace the logic board but finding one is hard and it's not worth the money)
 
Thanks guys, I was already beginning to fear you'd say that...
Well then, what parts shall I take out before I dispose of her? We have a working Lime and a Tangerine in the house as well so I'd hate to throw out spare parts I might need some day or other, but I'm sure my DH will not like me to keep the whole thing :D:D:D
 
as the pav board is separate from the rest you could take actually everything apart from that pav board as spare parts beginning with the crt ending with the ram :)
but its only the pav board ..bring this little bugger back to live you can grab these pav boards up somewhere on ebay i'm sure for next to no money at all

it's just me, i cant see a little imac g3 getting ripped apart for spares ,
it hurts and imac g3's have feelings too
 
it's just me, i cant see a little imac g3 getting ripped apart for spares ,
it hurts and imac g3's have feelings too
Click to expand...
I know, I feel the same way. May seem a dumb question, but does the 266 Mhz tray loading machine in fact have a PAV board? All the info I could find on PAV being the cause of this problem are about slot loading iMacs. Just looked up the extensive repair guide to those and man, they seem very different in many aspects! I've looked at the http://www.wileytradegroup.com/imac_repair/imac.pdf for my exact model and the block diagram doesn't show power/analog/video all contained in one unit, or so I think? I will dig out my voltage meter to do some more precise testing this weekend... to be continued :)
 
Is it really worth all that trouble?

You could pickup an eMac for about $75 that would spin circles around that iMac.

And you are done...
 
i love my eMac too, but the iMac g3's are so cute like little pets
so always remember a imac g3 is for life not just for christmas :)
 
Badger^2 said:
Is it really worth all that trouble?

You could pickup an eMac for about $75 that would spin circles around that iMac.

And you are done...
Click to expand...

Uh huh, I already picked up the exact same machine, different colour, for $27
and my daughter is completely fine with her 'new' computer too :D
But even so... the answer to your question, if it was that, IMHO is: yes :)
 
Suzy Darling said:
May seem a dumb question, but does the 266 Mhz tray loading machine in fact have a PAV board?
Click to expand...

No it does not. The tray loading G3 iMac's have a real power supply. It's similar to the ATX kind used in Windows PCs, but slighty different. The slot loading ones have a PAV board to power the hard drive.
 
R.i.p.

Not having to deal with a extremely difficult to access pav board boosted my hopes of reviving the strawberry a great deal :). So my dad came over and we had a really good time dismantling and studying the iMac's insides. It is such a lovely machine! Tested all of the power-failure related options in the repair guide, and finally measured... a bad power supply board fuse, yay! Dad gave it a good rub and when we put it back in it measured ok... So we decided to reassemble the machine, crossed our fingers, but alas, the original problem persisted :(:(:(. So it ends here I'm afraid. I took out the extra memory, (brand new) battery and HD, and convinced my husband who had watched the whole operation with growing interest I'd find a place to stow away the rest of the machine for future repairs on the other iMacs :D. Think I'll print out a paper copy of the repair guide too just to be on the safe side...
 
It is a sad day when a G3 iMac is pronounced dead. My Lime one died due to a power supply failure. I'm saving it until I get around to fixing the dead part(s).
 
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