It's my lucky day!

[Mad Max]

I bid on and won an R40 on Ebay for $42.00 supposedly non-working. It arrived today in almost like-new condition. It was listed as non-working, 1.3ghz, 256 ram, with no hard drive, but with AC adapter. When it arrived I checked it out thoroughly before putting power to it. Everything was intact, including what was actually 512 meg of memory and a 20 gig hard drive. Bonus! But what really shocked me was that when I put power to it, it fired right up. Now, it does have an lcd issue. I can see the display, but there is no back light. Probably what prompted them to sell it. Upon hooking it up to an external monitor, I was greeted with a boot password prompt, which of course I don't have. I jumped on the forum, found my solution, and was happily on my way booting into Windows XP. Turns out the machine is actually a 1.8 ghz machine, not the 1.3 as listed. Bonus again! These little black slabs are addicting to say the least! Now if I can just get the lcd working...........hmmmm.

[sparta.rising]

Awesome! Great find! For the backlight, there are numerous posts about this. From most likely to least its the ccfl tube, the inverter, fuses on the motherboard, or the cable. Just look around, there are lots and lots of posts covering all of those.

[Harryc]

Check the LCD open/close switch too.