I've... considered the dark side

[Claymonkey]

On my desk I have a tangerine imac DV. I've already replaced the 10GB drive with a 18gb drive and upped the 64mb to 384... soon to be 768. I've also installed OS X. I have to admit it's not terrible. Most of my mac experience is with broken ones. When people know you're a computer guru they come to you with ALL problems (you all know this pain). So I admit my thoughts on macs haven't always been good. That and my concept of user friendly is different from others.

Anyway, since it's a dv and has video out I'm going to stick it under my desk instead of on the deks and hook it up to my Dell 2005fpw LCD. It looks fine at 1024x768 since hte imac only does mirroring but I'd like more. For one I'd rather not have the CRT on and being a general space heater. Secondly, I figure if I unhook the crt it won't see it as a monitor and I can select other rez's. The original imacs made this easy.. it was just a normal plug header. I'm finding it odder difficult to find info on the inner workings of my slot loading imac outside of adding ram and replacing the HD. JW mentioned remember seeing lots of mod pages that talked aobut making imac's headless and putting them in odd things. Anyone remember any of this?

[KeiFront]

384mb is just ok 768mb of ram will make a lot of difference , I owned a iMac for a very short time (sold it with some profit ) and it ran ok speed wise a bit less then my G4 because of the slower graphics card.

[Jessterw]

See, I'd taken a sabbatical from Macs around when those damn things came out, so all I remember is 'seeing' a few links here and there, most of which I didn't follow.

I'll see what I can dig up, but as something for you to also look for, the iBooks only support mirroring as well; however, there is a firmware patch from a 3rd party that enables spanning. I imagine there was likely one created for the fruit puffs as well.

Still, I was under the impression that you could force the resolution higher when an external monitor is plugged in. The iMac's CRT wouldn't handle it and should shutdown/off.

[Claymonkey]

I have yet to see that option and 1024x768 has been the max. If I could turn off the internal monitor in any way I'll be happy to do it. I'll have to look for the firmware patch if it exists.

[Jessterw]

Well, apparently some of the earlier iMacs, possibly including the DV, are not able to utilize any sort of firmware patch, as the hardware* is specifically unable to do spanning. The firmware works in later versions because that's where Apple has disabled it.

*Hardware meaning the video connection as opposed to the graphics card.

[Claymonkey]

yes... though I'm hoping if I unhook the crt then OS X will see the lcd as the default instead of the crt and allow more video options

[TnT]

Good god I hated taking apart those iMacs. Never did anything like unhooking the CRT, but that metal shield thing was a pain.