My office is moving to a new place and they are throwing away a whole bunch of stuff, included in that a 15" TiBook with a broken hinge. So I saved it from the trash, and now need some help with it.

First, I need to get it some power. Does anyone know if my power adapter for my 1.33 GHz AlBook will work with this, or would that fry it? If I get this far, do these TiBooks work like the more modern macs, that you can plug them into external monitors, mice and keyboards and have them work?

Next, the right side hinge is completely broken, including the cables passing through it which are cut. The left hinge is also broken, but it looks like the cables are intact. The right side is just a pink and a black cable, so I assume that is just power or antenna, not the display cable which looks like it is on the left.

If I can get it to power up, I'm thinking about either fixing it up and letting my sister use it for the year (I'm fairly confident that this sub-1GHz, over 6 year old mac would be faster than her current 2 year old 2GHz Dell) or flip the screen around and make a very nice digital picture frame which I could eventually convert into a tablet. But does anyone have a better idea for a cool mod? And yeah, its too bad I just got this now instead of a month or two ago, could have had a sweet submission!

Could make for a nice digital picture frame or some sort of backup server or something. Maybe a touch screen table like device for a media center...

touch screen table device would be pretty sweet ... I just noticed there's an IR port on the back, so maybe I'd set it up as a digital picture frame / music server. I better get some batteries for my camera and take some pictures.

The pink and black cables are for the LCD backlight. You can plug in an external display quite happily. Your iBook PSU will power it just fine. It might be faster than a Dell for general admin and surfing, but don't expect it to be better at playing or encoding video or anything like that.

I got it turned on in target disk mode, but have not yet had luck with getting an external display working. Most definitely found some interesting files on this computer....

I really like this idea. Thats what I would do in this situation.

So, when i plug in an external monitor, I do get startup chime, but then the display cycles from black for about 3 seconds, light gray for 1, dark gray for 1 and back to black. I believe the computer is working properly other than that, as it takes hitting the power button twice for it to shut down. Do you think that means the video card is busted? If so, is that replaceable?

maybe it got shorted out or something... really weird. I can say though, that the video out can be a little sketch from time to time. I have always had better luck with the Mac OS X video controls over Apple's boot loader. Its only going to boot onto one screen, regardless of how many are attached. Maybe its still defaulting to the primary display; guessing that its extending and not mirroring...