iPods

I know this is a little "off-beat" for me, but I've been feeling a little "off" anyway, so why not! I've actually been involved with iPods for a while.... just as soon as they stopped being status symbols and became viable daily use items for us normal people.

Yup, I know; compared to most of my stuff (eg. Vinyl, CD, and even MiniDisc), it doesn't sound very good, but NOTHING compares with the storage capacity and flexibility. A few years ago, my wife was giving me "the signal" that she'd like to have one and even new at $250, it wasn't too bad, so she got it for Christmas.....which led to me spending the rest of my break loading our entire library of CDs on it! However, I must say that nothing is quite as convenient when leaving on a trip than just grabbing that thing and heading out the door....with our entire library of music. Not too long after, she wanted to have another one to put all her school stuff on so it'd be separate and easy to find.

That's when I got into the used iPod end of things. You know; the things don't break very often, so there's a bunch of them out there and if its not a current model they'll sometimes fall all the way down to something like $100 or so. I got her a white one (since her other one was black) for about $125 and everything was great. These were both the 5.5 Generation iPod "video" versions.

Then about a year later, we were getting ready to go to Alaska and of course, I needed to take a laptop to dump my digital photos, but I also wanted to make absolutely certain that those photos were backed-up as well. Thus entered my iPod; a black (of course) Generation 6 "Classic" with 80Gb capacity that I picked up locally on Craig's List for around $175.

Things have gone along pretty well for our stable of iPods, but recently, I was asked to take it to the "next level". My sister-in-law was coming in from Germany and along with her came 2 older iPods (1 Gen. 3, 1 Gen. 4) in need of repairs sent by my "lover of all things Apple", brother-in-law. Both had problems and I was to see if I could fix them economically, but if not, then they didn't need to go back.

Of course, they obviously needed to have their batteries replaced AND the 3G one needed a new hard drive as well since the one in there was "clicking". I've never been down this road before, so it was a little tense when I got the battery I ordered off of eBay and started to take the 4G apart. First time through, was a no go. Like the novice I was, I put the plug on backwards and it wouldn't charge. The second time though worked like a charm! So for 20 minutes of time and $5.35 expended; apparently, I'm in the iPod repair business!

Now...when the box of broken 3G parts that I bought on eBay for $10 show up next week, we'll see if I've really got any skills! Its not really worth fixing, but I love a challenge...especially if its something new I haven't tried before.