It will be difficult to tell whether your cube is in target mode without any video. It should work though. Even if your laptop has 10.5 installed, it should let you install 10.4 on an external drive (the cube). If you have an external hard drive, you could install Tiger on that and update using your laptop, then use that to start up the cube. You could also pick up an original stock Mac Rage 128 video card. They sell for about $5 these days. Once you get a 10.4.11 system running, be sure to make an image of it on DVD-R or make a clone of your HD so you don't get stuck again. The 6200 is the video card of choice for cubes, but it does have that one little gotcha!