Saving money by doing more silly things

The iPod I fixed by banging it hard against a wooden chest
Our iPod works (again)!

As reported earlier, I managed to use a few drops of nail polish remover to postpone my iPod Touch’s trip to the great pile of electronic waste that is one of the banes of our modern world. In the comments Matt Carlson mentioned that he’d had a similar experience reviving an MP3 player with a stuck hard drive head by smacking it — smacking it so hard that it flew out of his hand!

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

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One thought on “Saving money by doing more silly things”

  1. I have a 60GB iPod Video (called Classic now but mine is that old). I haven’t had the hard drive problem you mentioned but I had one that a good whack fixed. One day I plugged the iPod into my computer. It updated as usual and said it was charging. The next day I noticed that the battery was only half charged. I thought that was odd but there wasn’t much I could do about it at work. I plugged it in again that night and again it said it was charging. The next day I noticed it hadn’t charged again leaving just a couple hours of battery life. I listened until it died. At home I plugged it in and received a message to wait until it had enough power. It never got enough to get any further. I saw three possibilities: the iPod was dead, USB cord damanged, or USB port didn’t work right. I ruled out the cord and ports. A few days later I knocked the iPod off my desk to the floor. It is a fake wood floor and the impact was hard enough to make the hard iPod case go flying off. I figured it would be way dead after something like that but it was able to take a charge again. Now I’m thinking maybe there is a loose connection inside of it. The charging problem still happens to me from time to time (usually because I drop the iPod). Every time my solution is to punch it and it will start charging again.

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