Jebus, you buy a refurb in 2007 and you expect it to run forever, right?
It worked fine a few weeks ago, when I put it away. No drops, no hits, and no errors until I tried it last night, when it would not turn on.
“Aha! The battery must be dead,” I said, and replaced it with a brand new alkaline AAA. No nada. Another battery. Nope. Fiddled with the battery terminals; still nothing.
I have working laptops that are up to thirty years old. My “new” laptop is as old as my MP3 player. I bought my regular work calculator in 1985, but I have others that are ten years older than that. I have no idea just how old some of my stereo equipment is, but other stuff is pushing forty. In other words, I have certain expectations that, if electronic devices survive the first week, they will last a functional forever that accounts for my own eventual death, after which I stop caring.
So why would that piece of shit just up and die? I’m blaming cosmic rays, though I haven’t ruled out sunspots. Nor have I ruled out a Supreme Being saying, “Fer My sake, just get a new one, with more memory and a color screen to play itty-bitty videos. They’re $25!” It’s just the principle of the thing, and I do not appreciate disloyalty in my electronic devices.
My clock and luggage scale stopped working after the batteries leaked. I don’t think that’s the cause, though - I’ve got many things where the batteries leaked and they were fine.
But the techies I need don’t go to IMHO because they don’t have humble opinions.
I could take the easy way out and bop over to Microcenter at lunch and get one with 4gb and a color screen for $7.99 after rebate, but it has a rechargeable battery and no micro SD slot. I like using AAAs because they’re usually ready and always available, but mostly I want MY MP3 player to work.
SanDisk Sansa e130. Generic S1 MP3 player accessing far more disk space than I thought a Z80 could. This ain’t your father’s, or your, CP/M! There’s another thread about the fate of those fancy RISC ARM processors, but you just can’t kill the Z80 doing 64k of one damn thing after another, as it has since the Bicentennial. I love that microprocessor. Not as much as I love the 6809, though.
I put in a battery this morning and, mirabile dictu, it worked. Perhaps it picked up my ideation of throwing it out. Perhaps it needed to reboot and the only way to do it was by letting the caps drain overnight. I don’t know. Life’s a mystery.
