Technology’s a wonderful thing when it works but just when you get used to it – it lets you down. I’m not a gadget’s person. But I do like my old ipod. It’s a hand-me-down which used to belong to one of my children so it must be easily 4 or 5 years old. But out of the blue my trusty old click wheel ipod died a death a couple of weeks ago!

I’ve tried all Apple’s suggestions – reset it, reinstalled iTunes but nothing worked.  The Apple icon displayed for a moment then the sad ipod icon appeared and that was it – nothing – kaput.  I couldn’t restore it because it didn’t show up on iTunes.

Well I couldn’t sleep tonight – so it’s 4.30am and I’ve just made a cuppa and thought hey-ho let’s have another try. If nothing works this time then it’s straight round to Curry’s in the morning for a new ipod.

So I started looking on the internet again – this time I didn’t look at the Apple site just googled sad ipod. There were loads of tips on the user forums. Mainly just rehashing the advice on the Apple support pages. I did find  a good video on youtube which showed how to replace the battery and was thinking I might give that a go if all else failed. It looked simple enough.

But just as I was about to give up and go back to sleep I found a site called Zolved.com. The official information on the page follows the same pattern as all the other sites I’d been to – try disk mode, try ipod updater….. Which of course I’d already tried many times before. But don’t despair – scroll to the bottom to see the comments. And this is the funny bit – I was reading through the comments when I came to one by “Ray the Freak” who’d dropped his sad ipod and this had cured it. At least half of the rest of the comments were also saying that they’d banged the sad ipod and it had worked.

Now my ipod is well out of warranty so I tried it – I banged it on the side a couple of times, dropped it on the carpet from a height, dropped it on a hard surface, banged it on the back. Tried switching it back on a few times during all of this but no joy. Tried it again with a couple of sharp taps on the end, switched it back on and lo and behold my playlists appeared. It shows up on ITunes and is charging up as I write. I’ve played a couple of tunes and everything seems to be fine.

So it may seem drastic but it has worked for me. Thank you Ray!!