The AA battery versions of the JB's are notorious for eventually developing
broken solder connections near the battery connections at each corner of the
unit. This is caused by the fact that the tension of the battery spring flexes
the PC board that these things are attached to and causes the connections to
break. The solutions is simple for anyone with a soldering iron: Just resolder
the connections.

You can tell if you have this problem once you have the unit playing, hold the
JB at opposite corners and then attempt to twist the JB slightly back and forth.
Try the other two corners too. If the JB stops playing then you have broken
connections, and therefore an intermittent JB.

An additional related problem area I've found is at the end that has the IDE
hard drive connector on it. This connector is also mounted on one of the
flexing PC board. The problem is that the IDE connector won't flex, so what
happens is that some of the soldered connections at each end of the connector
also breaks free causing random disk errors. For me, these connections looked
fine, but were definitely broken because my JB didn't start working again until
I resoldered the first 4 or so columns of pins at each end of the connector.

One other possibility for the random turn-on problem could be slightly weak
batteries, perhaps ones that are physically cold. To turn on and spin up that
hard drive, the Archos surges a lot of current from the batteries. Weak, old,
or cold batteries often are not able to deliver that much current while
maintaining the 4.25 or so volts minimum required to keep the JB running. These
batteries may be otherwise fully charged. I have several sets of batteries that
will no longer work in my JB (or my Digital camera) but work just fine in
flashlights, walki-talkies, mulitmeters, remote controls, and other lower
current devices.


Doug Kalmer <sunart@...> wrote: I have an
Archos Jukebox 10 with 4 AA batteries, it still charges fine, but just
sometimes, it won`t turn on. I can have it not turn on, and then later it will,
without my doing anything to it. Any ideas? I had it rebuilt by Archos, they put
a new HD in it, and I installed Rockbox. Thanks, Doug

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