Apple Ipod, Click Wheel Problem

A friend of mine told me about this particular problem that he was having with his Ipod and asked me to report here the "fix" he found. The ipod is just over a year old and sadly without an extened warranty. How many gadgets seem to fail just beyond the warranty? Maybe we should start a survey - anyway, that's for another day.

My friend doesn't take his Ipod with him much and generally uses it on a docking system, (Sony I think). Anyway, after a period of using it on the music system, one Monday evening he wanted to take it on one of his (extremely) infrequentt trips to the gym.

Unfortunately, the click wheel (clickwheel) was not responding. The accepted fix, which he knew about from reading my "ipod just stopped working article" which seems to fix most problems with ipods, was to try the standard reset. Unfortunately this did not work and he was left bereft and ipod-less. He has quite a temper but did know from reading various articles online that there was no hope trying to get support in his local AppleStore. (Although I think this was more of an O2 shop than an AppleStore.) Either way, he left his cherished ipod switched off and forgot about it.

That Saturday night he phoned me in a bit of a panic as he was having a new date around for dinner and did not want to be faffing around with CD's all evening as the cooking was going to be quite involved (I think toast may have been involved) and could I suggest anything?

"Forget the toast" was my first suggestion, but that wasn't what he was looking for. I offered to call round and loan him mine, but that was met with equal derision, "I don't think Dire Straits and Bruce Springsteen will set quite the mood I am hoping for!" Fair enough, I do have quite limited musical taste. "Well, you'r on your own mate" I said, "But you could try the reset again before you give up and resort to CD's"

He hung up as his doorbell rang!

A couple of days later he phoned to congratulate me on the stroke of genius that had led him to have "one last try" at resetting the ipod. For some reason it had worked and his evening had gone well. The toast was unburned and the mood was a masterpiece of ipod controlled calm and gentle seduction. At least that'w what he said. I don't know if he's seeing her again.

Since this episode his Ipod has contuinued to work without problems, but he is seriously considering investing in an Ipod shuffle, for his favourite mood creation tracks, just in case his "main" ipod should let him down at a vital moment in the future.