Virus attack or a Hardware malfunction?

It was the deadline for a paper and Fischer was typing away furiously on his old AMD Athlon, ASUS motherboard system. Then all of a sudden pftt!!! the computer switched itself off without a warning. Not a reboot, not a shutdown but a switch off! It was futile to attempt to switch it on immediately. Only after 25 seconds would the system reboot.

Fischer pondered on whether this was due to a problem with the system hardware or if it was a virus attack?

Upon reboot Fischer ran the program SpyBot - everytime the program completed 70% of the checks the above phenomenon repeated. Frustrated Fischer resorted to checking the hardware. On opening he found a thick layer of dust on the CPU Heat sink. Could this be the reason?

As it turns out ... it was! Dust on the heat sink caused the CPU over heating resulting in no-warning system switch off. The dust was off and Fischer's PC was back in action. Check here if Fischer's PC is still alive.

Watch videos on your 1st Generation iPod Nano installing RockBox

Before you begin you need

1. A 1^st Generation iPod Nano - (Check if your player is supported by rockbox here)
   
2. A backup of all the data on the iPod

With these + a whole lot of courage follow these steps :-

1. Install RockBox (An Open Source Jukebox Firmware)
• You can download the current build from here - http://build.rockbox.org/
• Connect the 1st Generation iPod Nano to the PC via USB
• Connect it to the PC in Disk Mode
• Pressing both the Menu and the Select (center) buttons reboots the Nano
• As the Nano is rebooting if you hold the Play and the Select (center) button it will reboot into Disk Mode
• Extract the contents of the file downloaded into the root directory of the iPod Nano
• Explore the contents of the iPod with win explorer. You will see a directory called .rockbox (NOTE: Do not change the name of this directory or any of its sub-directories)
• Now, In order to make your player load and execute the Rockbox firmware you have just installed, you will need to install the Rockbox bootloader (next step)
  
2. Run the iPodPatcher
• Download ipodpatcher.exe from here and run it
• Follow the instructions
• Congratulations you have a iPod that dual boots Rockbox and the Apple OS firmware
• REMEMBER the patcher installs the RockBox as the default OS
• Now to boot into the RockBox firmware
• Do nothing Reboot the iPod Nano – it boots RockBox by default
• And to boot into the Apple OS firmware -
• Reboot the iPod Nano pressing both the Menu and the Select (center) buttons
• Hold the Menu key to reboot to the Apple OS firmware
• For more details on the installation visit this link
  
3. Encode your favorite videos
• To be played on the 1^st Generation iPod Nano using WinFF from - http://biggmatt.com/winff/ - WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG

IMPORTANT NOTE :-

If anything goes wrong you can restore your iPod Nano Apple OS firmware using iTunes’ Restore utility. Just remember - In order to ensure that you do not damage your iPod, before disconnecting your cable be sure that you see the “Ok to Disconnect” message on your iPod.