So close...

My neighbour upstairs is turning into a really good friend. He is an expat here in Switzerland too (he comes from Jersey) and we have struck up a nice relationship with him. I hope that things continue this way because I like him and Ms Mac and I both enjoy his company very much.

Yesterday, we went upstairs so I could install a new hard drive in his older model Toshiba Equium. He has been surviving (albeit barely) on an 8 GB HDD and he had 115MB left. So I set him up with a new 80 GB ATA 133 Maxtor for about CHF95- and said I'd put it in for him. I took the Frau with me and we had a few drinks and I got to work. Of course, his Windows ME system and his old school 1998 BIOS couldn't even see the new HDD. After a BIOS update (downloaded over dial-up: how did any of us ever cope???) I managed to have the PC find the disk and then I had to remember how to get it into DOS so I could FDISK and FORMAT the drive for Windows to use it. This meant another download of from Bootdisk.com over the dial-up again.

To cut a long story short, it took a bit longer than I thought but we got there in the end and now John is packing a huge new HDD for his data.

But this isn't the point of the post. We sat around drinking loads of red wine after the PC was done and John was playing a seemingly endless supply of music. Ms Mac said "how are you playing all this music John?" and it turns out he was playing his Creative Nomad 3 MP3 player through his stereo. He had just bought a new one and his old one was mine if I wanted it. As anyone who knows me should realise by now, I am so keen for an MP3 player. So of course I just about kissed him.

Slight catch, John went on a trip recently and forgot his power adapter and used a 6V power pack at his friends house in France. Since then, the Nomad hasn't switched on. The general supposition is that he cooked it in some way. If I could fix it, I could have it. For a geek like me, it was almost better than if he'd given me a new one.

This morning, I pulled it apart and this is what I found inside:



Looks fine on this side.



Oh dear some fried components.

I need to see if any of the guys at the company can do anything. If not, I scored a neat little 6GB HDD to put into one of those portable housings and use it as a kick-ass USB HDD. Six times better than the biggest flash memory stick and way cheaper.

So close....

---End Transmission---