A couple of people have expressed interest privately in attempting this fix on their own. It's not too difficult, so here are more detailed instructions for those with soldering skills.

First, install this special version of Hijack on your player. After rebooting, you should see a new Hijack menu item, Fix Temperature Sensor, but don't use it yet.

Now disassemble your player, almost completely. Remove the front fascia, buttons, and lens, and the hard drive tray. Remove the front display completely, by undoing the four little screws (two on each side of the player), similar to the screws for the drive tray. There is no need to remove the main board, but the display has to come completely out (it's in the way).

Now locate the ds1821 chip, using the photos from earlier in this thread.. the chip is normally hidden under the display cable.

Examine the photos from earlier in this thread again, and identify pin-8 -- the one I have lifted and attached the blue wire to.

Desolder and lift pin-8 of the ds1821 chip in your player. This is the only difficult part of this repair. If you screw up, the worst that can happen is you will break the pin, and have to replace the entire chip (about $6 from digikey.com, plus S&H).

Fortunately, pin-8 is a corner pin, so access to it is much easier than for most other pins. There's no perfect way to accomplish this, but what I do is:

• use a 650 degree fahrenheit (343 Celsius) soldering iron.
• use a 1/32" tip (or finer).
• apply flux to pin-8 of the chip.
• put a tiny bead of solder on the iron tip.
• apply the iron to the pad on the board for pin-8.
• grab/lever pin-8 up and out with fine tweezers or an Xacto knife.
• do not take too long here, or you may overheat the board and ruin the pad permanently.
• remove soldering iron, and use tweezers to gently straighten the pin and bend it up to at least horizontal.

Whew.. that's the tough bit done. Now get a DPST (or DPDT) switch of any kind, and a pair of alligator clip jumper wires.

Solder a very slender 6"/15cm (or longer) wire onto the center contact of the switch, and lightly solder the other end of the wire to pin-8 of the chip. This temporary joint doesn't need to be strong, but the wire does have to make some contact with the pin. If you have very small test clips, use those instead of soldering.

Connect alligator clips between one side contact of the switch and the case of the empeg. Just like the green clips in my earlier photo. Easy.

Locate the pair of blue jumpers near the back/center of the empeg mainboard. Remove (either) one of those jumpers to expose the two pins under it. These pins are at +5V when the empeg is powered. Verify this with a volt meter if you are at all uncertain.

Use a second set of alligator clips to connect the other side of the switch to those +5V pins on the empeg mainboard (see the yellow connections I used in the photo).

The resistor I used (in photo above) is probably not necessary, but if you want, you can add one: it goes between the +5V and center contacts of the switch. Anything from 1K to 10K is fine. This keeps pin-8 from floating randomly for a brief instant when the switch position is being changed.

Now set the switch to the +5V position, and reconnect the empeg display to the mainboard. Be *very* careful that the display connector is properly aligned and the right way around, or you'll blow some SMT fuses and maybe other stuff!!

Power on the empeg, no hard drives are needed.

Now move the switch to the grounded position.

Push and hold the knob until the Hijack menu appears.

Select Fix Temperature Sensor from the menu. It will then prompt you to move the switch to the +5V position. Do so, and then give the front-panel knob a gentle twist to the right.

The Hijack High Temperature Warning screen should then appear. Wait 5 seconds or so, and then verify that the temperature reading (the "Currently" line) shows a realistic value near room temperature, plus or minus 10 degrees. If not, then move the switch back to Ground, and repeat the Fix Temperature Sensor procedure again until it works.

Once you see valid temperature readings, power off the empeg, remove all of your jumpers/wires, and prepare to resolder pin-8 of the chip:

• Reinstall the blue +5V jumper you removed earlier!
• Apply more flux to pin-8 and the pad to which it will be resoldered.
• Push the pin-8 down onto the pad.
• Apply the soldering iron tip to the pin, and push it onto the pad firmly but not abusively. It should stick and stay.
• Remove the soldering iron from the pin.

Use a magnifier to inspect the chip, and see if solder has bridged onto the adjacent pin. Hopefully not. If it has, then apply more flux, and use some fine copper de-soldering braid (with the soldering iron) to remove the excess solder -- this works extremely well when done gently.

Check again for a bridged solder joint. Use an ohm-meter if possible, to ensure that pins 7 and 8 are not connected. Actually, this doesn't really matter, since pin-7 is a "no connect" pin, so don't fuss over it too much if things are being stubborn.

Clean the flux from around/on the chip using a Q-tip swab and some alcohol (100 proof or better; consume any excess! ).

Reattach the display board and verify that everything still works. Then re-install the latest version of Hijack, replacing the special one you installed for this procedure.

Cheers