about my eReader...

I feel the need to rant and rave today about my eReader. I have a Sony Touch (PRS-600)--NOT the latest model, but the next-to-latest. Choosing it involved about a year of dithering, researching, comparison shopping, and acknowledging that a Kindle would bleed me dry in a week, as I have a tendency to GLOM backlists. My darling Sony limits that somewhat, in that I have to actually physically hook it up to a computer in order to download books onto it (although it's still ridiculously easy to shop at all my favorite sites: Diesel, All Romance EBooks, Samhain, Torquere...the list goes on.) And just because, I kind of want a Kindle, too. Just because (sorta).

So anyway. Today, my lovely red Reader decided to be a little B*tch today, when I hooked her up to the computer. I kept getting the message that the computer could not read the USB device (or something along those lines, anyway...) so I visited the Sony support webpage for help. I downloaded firmware. I tried uninstalling the device driver. I uninstalled/reinstalled software, I restarted the computer (like, a million times). I poked around on my external hard drive, trying to make sure I'd successfully backed up all my books when the other laptop (MY laptop; I'm currently sharing the DH's) started having issues. As it happens, I didn't. (boo) Luckily, however, I tend to mostly buy direct from small pubs, and was able to re-download everything, so I only lost one book. It was a "free limited time" offer, and now it's regularly priced, so I may one day get busy with the malfunctioning computer and see if it will cooperate long enough to try and rescue that one particular book...

Turns out what had to happen was a hard reset of the Reader--which means, dumping *everything* and restoring it to fresh-outta-tha-box factory settings. Like I said, I still have everything I wanted to keep, minus the one book, and now (for now, anyway) everything works fine. I need to get on to getting everything on memory card, though. That's why I picked this particular reader--it has memory card slots, so I can categorize my books, and hide the "Inappropriate Content" from the Ravening Barbarian Horde, and have an extra backup of everything  (without having DRM hissy fits) if this ever happens again. The downside to the memory cards? They can slow down certain functions, like deleting individual books from the reader/card itself, and it can be slow catching up when you first insert or remove the memory card. But I haven't noticed any real difference in, for example, battery life. Which is less than I was led to believe but I hear around the internet that those guidelines for battery charge are based on the "average" reader, and, let's face it, I am well above average in terms of the amount of time I spend reading on a weekly basis.

Also, regarding the sucktastic-ness of my old computer--it's the second HP I've had problems with in a year's time. It's supposed to be still under warranty, but it's been dinged a bit so they won't fix it under warranty. I can't afford a new one right now, so for the foreseeable future, I will be using the DH's. And come tax refund time, when I can get a new one? I'm SO getting a Mac. (That's right, I'm going over to the Dark Side.)