We feel that it is appropriate to issue the following warning.

Our US service center has received several players with "dead screens". In many cases this appears not have been caused by a manufacturing or design fault.

Component C13 is an electrolytic (metal can) capacitor that is located along the upper edge of the display board. We have received players in which this capacitor has been broken right off of it's leads, causing the display to fail.

The only way we can find to cause this particular damage is by pulling the drive bay out the wrong way (front end first) very hard so that the drive connector collides with the capacitor.

This email is intended to fulfil two purposes.

Firstly, although up until now we have repaired these players under warranty without comment, we will now reconsider this approach. This specific damage could not be caused without taking the lid off and playing inside the product, therefore the warranty is most definitely invalidated. This is exactly the reason that we have the "lid off warranty exclusion" - if someone causes this kind of damage to their player they're certainly not competent to be working inside of it.

Secondly, some of you are going to take your players apart no matter what we say. Therefore we want to issue this warning so that you will not make the same mistake and damage your display board. If you have to pull hard to remove the drive bay you're not doing it right - after removing the mounting screws you should be able to slide it upwards, rear end first, without colliding with other components. Fitting is the reverse procedure, taking care to fold the drive cables in the same way as we have.

One final tip - if you are going to invalidate your warranty and open your player, do NOT unplug the cable that runs to the display board. We have had players returned with every fuse on the board blown - the only thing that causes this to happen is to misalign the display connector.

Rob