I’ve got two old beige G3 Macs in the home office, which are mainly used by the kids. Since they’re Apple hardware running Mac OS X, they’re pretty solid, even though they’re going on 8 years of use…

So today one of them had some problems starting up. Blank screen. We rebooted a few times, tried to start from a CD, and then tried all those things again. Finally, we switched monitors and determined it was a monitor problem. I can fix Macs, but fixing monitors? I don’t do that.

We though all was lost, but if you’ve ever fixed things, you know the last (or sometimes first) method you can try is the old “hit it” method. I gave the monitor a quick smack on the top, and it came to life. Success! It’ll probably die soon, but for now, it’s working just fine…