2 weeks ago, I had the sudden urge to backup all 28.5gb of music on my iPod. I use Anapod from Redchair, so it was a simple matter of copying and pasting to my hard drive.

So everything was dumped over without a hitch, but the next day, there was trouble! When I tried playing a song, the hard drive would spin furiously, the iPod would hang, and the song would not play. If I left it and didn’t touch anything, the song would play after a few minutes of hang time, but it would skip. Going from one track to the next also had the same long delay.

I did the resets a couple of time to no avail. When I tried hooking it up to Windows, it could not be detected. On my MacMini, I could see it in iTunes, but couldn’t do anything with it. Maybe the backing up of my music the night before gave the iPod a bit of a workout and stuffed it up.

So I gave up, and decided to send the iPod back to Apple for warranty service. When I first bought the iPod back in Aug 2004, I had the hindsight to get the Apple Protection Plan, that added another year to the iPod’s original one year warranty. But the guy at the Apple store told me he would register everything on my behalf and there was nothing I needed to do. To my horror, the Apple site said my iPod was out of warranty.

Fortunately, I was able to fax my proof of purchase over, and was able to print a prepaid shipping label. So I went to Australia Post and had it sent off, and didn’t hear anything from them for a week. But last Thursday, I got a call from Apple and they asked for my Apple Protection Plan Enrolment number, which I had handy.

Now I was a bit worried about Apple honoring the warranty, because when I just bought the iPod, I dropped it on my driveway. Which resulted in 3 visible dents, the case beint slightly bent and scratches all over. The iPod did work okay, and it was only after one and a half years of use did it start acting up.

I checked the Apple Service Status site everyday, but they didn’t have much information there. But yesterday, I got an email saying the a replacement iPod had been shipped out, and they gave me a tracking number that I could check on the Australia Post web site. The stupid site kept reporting that nothing by that number could be found.

Today, I got iPod! It was delivered to the office, and I’m happy to say Apple gave me a brand new unit. I was half hoping that they’d run out of 4th generation iPods and sent me a iPod video… but of course I was dreaming. Currently moving all the songs from my computer over to the iPod. Through iTunes. Stupid Redchair has this activation thing that binds it to the serial number, and their deactivation process isn’t instantaneous.