Black Screen, Dead HD, Bad SuperDrive My MacLemon experience!

This is going to be me reviving my 6 year old problem child. I will no doubt hit bumps in the road and this forum has revived my desire to not let this one beat me.. So here is the beginning of my effort to solve all its problems. It has the black screen weird problem where you can get the screen to flash with quick pushes of the power button. Runaway Fan, Dead Hard Drive and SuperDrive that only makes coasters..

I am in the process of troubleshooting a EMC 2803 that has pretty much been the flakiest Macintosh I have ever owned. I purchased it in June of 2010 for full retail of $1499.00.

First odd thing I noticed after about a year was the screen would flicker every now and then. During 2012 the Optical drive started making coasters. Flicker got worse and more frequent. By Aug of 2013 I noticed the internal hard was showing signs of impending failure so as a fail safe I purchased a Toshiba 2tb external and used Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror my internal to it. Flicker was more pronounced on reboots or startup. Coming out of sleep became a game of pushing the power button over and over to get the backlighting up. September of 2013 internal hard drive died. I used the external to boot from until finally in December of 2013 it went black screen. You could restart the computer and once it was booted quick press the power button to put it asleep and then get a flash of video when you pressed any key or clicked the mouse. At this point I shoved it into the corner of my desk bought a iPad mini and after 25 years as a Macintosh consultant walked away from my computeroom.

Needless to say i had been researching these issues as they happened but there was very little info around back then. It only took let's see a little over 2.5 years to get over the level of !#^&@@ off I'd gotten at trying to resolve the issues, oh I forgot to mention the constant unmounting of external hard drives that was going on. I've noticed now there sure are a lot of users with black screens, failed hard drives and such. At the time mine failed the Apple recall only covered the 27 inch.

So I'm Back! Ordered LCD inverter board today and a SuperDrive. I'll post what happens as I wrestle the beast..