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I have a G3 ibook (the white one, not the clamshell) that I purchased off of ebay a couple months ago. Everything was working fine untill today I pulled it out of my bag and the screen doesn't work.

You can power it on and hear the HD working, and if you give it a minute you can close the screen and the little light comes on in the front that tells you its in standbye. But when the screen is open nothing shows up and the apple logo on the back doesn't light up.

Any ideas?

not real familiar with mac but i know most laptops have a monitor out put (vga what ever it might be) and most laptops that have that feature if you press a sertain sequince of buttons it switches from the lcd to the vga press those buttons again just look around on the keyboard something like

fn-f4 on mine il take a pic in a second so you can see what im talking about


trying to get a decent un blury pic with the camera give me 5 minutes

yea, i know what you are talking about. I don't see a funtion button for that on my ibook, but i will look it up

should look similar but im no mac expert

seems odd that an lcd would just die all of a sudden but you never know theese days i hope i was some help i had to fix somebody elses computer by doing that took me five minutes to realive that was the issue

The Mac automatically detects whether there is a display attached via VGA or not, no need to fool around with Fcn+F4 (my old Vaio had that same exact key combination too).

Your best bet is to connect an external monitor to the iBook. IIRC they require a converter cable from iBook-->VGA (the port on your iBook is a squarish looking thing), hopefully you got one with it. If the external monitor works, then your display probably has a loose connection. If it doesn't, you may have a bad video card (more unlikely as it was working fine before, but a possibility.)

The Apple logo on the back works by the backlight of the display, so if the front of the display won't light up, it won't either.

i don't have one of those cables, but i will see if one of my friends has one. thanks.

I have the same iBook.

Before anything, make sure you check the brightness (2 of the F Keys - I can't remember which ones) - just in case.

There's a known issue with the video logic board that sometimes effect external monitors as well on this model. There's a decent chance an external monitor won't work even if you can connect it. But to try, you'll need the special ADC (IIRC) adapter which will give you VGA connectivity.

Either way, You're going to have to have it sent out for repairs if you want it working again.

But the potential good news is that there's a chance it's covered under an extended warranty Apple issued for quite a few of these iBooks. There was a bad batch of them they released a few years ago (if it's in that range). I ordered 22 of them at my last job and 10 of them had to be sent back before I left the place.

I would call up Apple and ask them about it. They can help you further. Their customer support is excellent.

I had a ton of problems with my g3 ibook, in the 2 years I had it, I had to send it in for video problems 5 times. each time they replaced the main logic board. After it died the 5th time, I complained and got a brand new g4 ibook

Wasn't the brightness. I would have felt really dumb if it was though

I will try the external monitor tonight if i can find an adaptor. I will pry just take it to the apple store tommorrow, there is one across the street from where I work.

Thanks for the help guys.