Brian's Blog

The new battery came in today for my iAudio M5. Replacing original should be super easy for anyone who feels comfortable with a soldering iron. I was thinking of putting together a series of pictures of the replacement steps to post but being that my digital camera is dead that won't be possible. Besides, someone already did it for the X5 which is physically identical to the M5 anyway.

In short these are the steps.

1. Take the 4 screws out of the back and take the back plate off. The screws are really tiny so be careful not to loose them.
2. Carefully remove the bit of tape at the top holding the wires down.
3. Gently move the wires out of the way and pull out the data cable to the hard drive at the top of the player near the circuit board just under where you took the tape off. You have to lift the top of the drive out a bit to be able to pull the cable. One the data cable it out the drive will just slide out.
4. The out the black rubber gasket thingy under the drive. This just sits there and isn't attached to anything or at least it wasn't in my player. The battery is under the gasket. In my case it was a green flat block with two wires, one red and one black.
5. Use your soldering iron to carefully desolder the wires battery wires from the board. It's small in there so watch you don't touch anything else with the iron and damage it. Make a note of what color wire is where so you can put them in the right place with the new battery.
6. Solder the new battery in place.
7. Put it all back together in reverse and test it.

And that was that. This is was worked for me so YMMV. Oh...If you kill your player doing what I did then it's not my fault.

Yes, I've changed my mind in the course of a day. Foxmarks is nice and it worked well the little bit I used it. However, being the stupidly paranoid sort of geek just don't like putting my data on someone else's server unless I have to. I know there are arguments for and against and I know I'm a hypocrite in certain situations. Still, it's one of my little quirks. Therefore, I have changed over to the Bookmark Sync and Sort add-on for Firefox. It does pretty much the exact same thing except it uses the webdav server of your choice. It's not as convenient in that you have to setup a webdav server for it, but since I already had one setup it was a piece of cake.