iPod, reanimated!
About a year and a half ago, my old 4th gen iPod stopped working. I woudl try to turn it on, and it would make the pitiful hard drive whining sound, stop, and give me the sad iPod icon.
I didn’t do anything with it for a while, because I assumed tha tonce the hard drive gave me that sound, the whole thing was toast. I started looking into ways to replace the hard drive, and maybe even replace it with a compact flash card to provide more storage space. (Easy: http://www.tarkan.info/20080126/tutorials/32gb-compact-flash-ipod Ugly: http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/767/put-flash-memory-into-almost-any-ipod)
At the time, I calculated that it would cost abou $100 to do this, and at that price, I might as well get a new iPod.
One day, I got bored and just took my iPod apart, then put it back together. Curious as to whether it was still broken, I plugged it into my computer and magically, it worked! I reset the iPod, but then I needed to plug it into the power adapter in order to finish the process. Problem: I hadn’t used the power adapter in months because I didn’t have a reason to, and Pam didn’t know where it was either. We didn’t end up finding it until we moved, but now I have a fully functioning pre-video iPod again!