Late 2006 iMac - rescued from electric waste

This morning I rescued an iMac (late 2006, Intel) from a electric waste bin (WEE or something).
The specs of the iMac in question: http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=w870401kwar

After plugging in a mains cable, it turned on (so PSU works), but the screen suffers infamously from what many iMacs from that period tend to get. Mine is totally black on one half with lines vertically coming down. I can barely see an error message on the screen (a "question mark"; I presume the original owner wiped the HDD clean before dumping it).


So what I liked to ask everyone on this forum are two questions:

1) How should I get this thing to work?

I can get a mini DVI to HDMI (or DVI) adapter to at least get the video out from the iMac to my 23" 1080p monitor to temporarily solve the lcd screen problem.

Apparently the max MacOS it can run is X 10.7.5. How would I get that fixed?

2) Worth upgrading?

Of course this is dependent on whether or not I can get the thing to work.

a) upgrade the RAM from 1gb to 4gb.
b) replace the 160gg HDD with a 128gb SSD.

It's nice to get find an iMac for free and I don't mind spending a bit of money to get it off the ground and working again.

somurray said:

…but the screen suffers infamously from what many iMacs from that period tend to get. Mine is totally black on one half with lines vertically coming down.

1) How should I get this thing to work?

Click to expand...

Most likely it has a video hardware problem…which mans it probably needs a new logic board. This costs more than the computer is worth…and that's probably why it was thrown out.

- Nick

yep honestly i have one of these and i keep it in storage not enough graphics power the board was nortoruis for failures no thank you never again

Like so very much in this world it is worth what you paid for it!