Chosen Solution

Hi All, I have a couple of vertical lines on my display - the number of lines are growing slowly(6 at the moment) I mirrored the display on my TV , no lines there. Is it the display panel itself or could be the wire connects the logic board to the LCD? Or something else? Thanks. Update I did lot a research on the web, and figured there are lots of people who suffered from the same issue. There are two possible solutions:

  1. You buy LCD panel online and take it to a pc shop and pay for repair.
  2. Make a lots of phonecalls to apple and if you pushy enough might get lucky and apple might fix it for you for 30-50$. They changed mine LCD. Said there was a factory defect on some of the LCDs for the G5s. Give it a try! Good luck Update 2 Here’s a useful thread to check.

Are the lines in fixed positions on the screen - i.e. if you change the display resolution in System Preferences/Displays - are they still in the same place? if they stay in same place and also no corresponding lines appear on an external display, then it’s likely the LCD panel itself (and not the graphics chip) there are a couple other posts with the tag lines on screen where I previously mentioned possible failure of LCD driver ICs

The 17" and 20" screens in both the iMac G5 Isights and the first gen intel iMacs are notorious for having bad lcd Panels - Usually shows up as blue or yellow vertical lines Approx 1px wide.

i got mine fixed by apple for free. Its a special kind of thing for our type of iMac’s. Its more like a Customer Satisfaction thing.

I had the line 1 appearing, then line 2, and line 3 it took several months before it became unbearable, after several calls and personal questions to Apple, and different answers, I finally payed Apple 35 Euros, instead of 500, and had the problem solved. This is only, I think, with iMac G5 17" with built in camera.

The underneath video has 8 parts, you have to search for it to see the whole process… it seems to be the cheapest and most durable fix ;) As to the root of the Problem: I did some research myself and found that most display problems are in fact gpu, or better gpu solder problems. The GPU is only cooled by a heat sink, apple’s official idea was, that the cpu cooler would pull the hot air also off the heatsink, what doesn’t work at all. Just hold your hand left above the apple sign after you used it for a while and you’ll see what I mean. Because this heat, the logic board deforms very minimal but enough to brake the soldering… you see very similar problems in notebooks and game consoles. So if you’re at a point where you would through away your iMac anyway, you’d might give this a try and maybe end up with a useable computer again ;) Part1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok2uJZSQD… Part6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqAg4c9Sf…

I had mine changer by Apple for free even with no warranty, after lots of calls in the past two years