I think it’s desperation that leads me to write about such mundane topics, but I have a theory that if I just keep writing badly my muse will find me and put an end to end. So…
I plugged in my iPod today and was greeted with a pleasant error message, “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode – Use iTunes to restore”. For anyone that doesn’t know, “restore” is basically ipod lingo for reformat that hard drive and reinstall the OS. Seeing as I have nearly 40 GB of music on this thing I wasn’t looking forward to go through the process of transferring all that music so I went looking for a work around. A quick search of Google revealed this page. Don’t bother reading it, it says essentially the same thing the error message said. But it goes on to say that if you continue to get the error after restoring you should try changing the drive letter in Windows. So I ask myself, why should I delete all of my music when the apple support says that might not fix the problem. Skipping step one, I removed the ipod drive letter in windows and assigned a new one. I then plugged it in and voilà ; iTunes recognizes it without errors.
If I had been a casual user and followed the directions in the error message, I would have wasted the better part of an evening transferring music back to my mp3 player. Consumer technology companies employ this one step approach to fixing problems because it does work, and it’s cheap to implement.