Black screen in old Quicksilver G4 [resolved]

Thought I would share this problem resolution as I culled the various techniques from these forums and thought a recap might help some other person searching for this in the future. Thanks to the board for the fix.
PROBLEM: G4 would appear to begin booting (startup sound LED power button light, fans, sounds of disk activity all present), but monitor(s) would remain dead blank black. Could not ping machine over network, keyboard and mouse did not appear to be working (could not invoke keyboard shortcuts, no mouse light, no luck with keyboard-modified startup modes like "safe"). Could not start normally from CD. Looked and sounded like it was running fine but no monitors.
Tried all manner of PRAM/PMU resets and also tried a "hardware reset" I read about here where I unplugged power, removed battery, held Power and PMU buttons down for 30 seconds, them let sit for (well more than) 30 minutes, etc. (following standard procedures, careful attention to only pushing PMU once, etc. at times). No dice. Thoroughly cleaned and vacuumed computer, ports, etc. No dice, but now pleasantly clean.
Next, after removing all other PCI cards, I tried all manner of Video card troubleshooting (swapped with another similar machine's card, swapped with on-hand 3rd party cards. etc. Nothing (except that all cards worked fine in other machine).
Was running out of known fixes, rituals and incantations. Then saw something here about "shuffling RAM" and realized that I hadn't even re-seated the RAM (which might have worked on it's own), so I rotated positions for my 3 dissimilar memory cards (not like the paired slots of G5s, so can go in any order in the 3 available slots).
That fixed it!
I have had RAM problems once before, but got the "safe" mode screen or at least some kind of screen activity and was also able to boot from a CD, so this fooled me.
I have not yet tested the RAM as this is a light-duty machine and I simply haven't bothered, but I can say that all of the re-seated RAM shows as available via System Profiler. Running fine now. If it goes down again, I may weed out bad RAM.
Good luck if you have a similar stumper.

Hi,
i recently had a similar problem... I posted a similar help plea just before yours.
Just wondering, my problem arises when I starting up. It shows the screen for a moment (blue background with watch dial turning), then blanks out... the system still runs, I hear disk activity, the screen power light is one, my machine is on, but I can use my mouse nor my keyboard for example ejecting the CD tray.
I initially thought that it was the graphics card as MacOS 9 haulted when loading the ATI control panel, (I hope not), I then thought that it couldn't have been cause the image on the screen shows, it isn't just blank. I thought then maybe it would be the battery... not sure
I will further investigate this tonight and try your suggestion of re-inserting the memory dimms
cheers

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