I can't turn the damn thing on

It's a new machine - I charged it up - it initialy showed charging but then seemed to crash (screen had odd characters etc zooming up it). I left it charging for 3 hours and then tried the on button.

At first it did nothing - after a number of reboots (taking battery out) it made a welcome sound (short tune) but the screen would not come on. I seem to get the cursor button light up blue for a momement when I first hold the button then after about 4 seconds I get the sound. If I press the button later I get a sort of beep sound. The screen has never shown anything - no maemo etc.

Is it a dud? should I press something else. I've had the battery out for a minute at a time before retrying. I've tried with power lead attached and without, with SD card in and out. Nothing.

It wouldn't be so bad but I work with computers for a living

Mike

PS the screen does seem to glow a lightish gray colour. Also the machine did show up as a disk drive (actually 2 disk drives) when I connected to my XP machine but I couldn't access anything - the PC just said insert a disk into it.

DOA. I'd return it.

Ninja

As a last resort you may try to reflash the firmware. One you turn it on while holding Home key pressed, does Nokia firmware update wizard recognize it?

I concur with Ninja. It's DOA. I wouldn't bother trying to flash it - in no way should it be possible to arrive in a condition requiring that.

If it won't switch on the first time you use it, return it for a replacement. There's no point messing around with faulty hardware if you've paid for new hardware.

By the way, on a working tablet it takes about 3 to 5 seconds of holding the power button down before it switches on.

I'm the impatient sort so I thought I'd have a bash at reflashing the n800 and see if that fixed it. I've downloaded two files onto my XP PC (flasher-3.0 and RX-34_2007SE_4.2007.38-2_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin) but have no idea what to do with them!

I assume the bin file is what has to be downloaded onto the n800, and so I double clicked the flasher file but XP had no idea what to do with it. Help!

If I can't get it to work then I'll send it back. Any ideas where the best deals are on these devices (I saw buy.com in the US is selling for $240 but has anyone tried buying one over here in the UK).

Mike

If you can't turn the damn thing on, as you stated above, it is impossible to flash it.

If you can turn it on, you connect the usb cable, run the Nokia program and follow instructions, EXCEPT that you probably can skip holding down the home key at all. Someone suggested that here, and I found it to be true. The important thing is that you have to see the usb symbol on the N800, which shows that it is connected. If you never see the usb symbol, forget it.

I am only familiar with flashing from WinXP. You run the Nokia program and follow the instructions, with the exception in my case of holding down the home key.

You may have to try to do this several times, and you may have to try more than one USB connection or even more than one computer.

If you can see the USB connection symbol, it is worth trying. If not, not.

flasher-3.0 is for Linux.

To update the software on your N800 when using XP you need to install the Nokia Software Update Wizard.

Since you have already downloaded the .bin file, follow the instructions described in "Instructions for manual update" as the automatic update will download the .bin file again, which is unecessary.

The machine works - I get a tune when I power it up but I have a completely blank screen. When I first tried to charge it this is what happened:

• I got a charging message up for about 10 min
• I then pressed a few buttons to see if I could start to play with it (while it was still charging)
• the charging message then went "odd" and after about 30 seconds the screen went into "matrix" mode (odd chars and graphics appearing all over screen)
• I assumed it had tried to run something and not had enough power so it had crashed.
• I didn't know how to turn it off and hadn't had a good result by pressing buttons so I left alone and let it charge.
• When I next looked at it (3 hours later) I couldn't get anything up on the screen even though I got a startup sound.

I assumed either the contrast / brightness is way off or the drivers for the screen have been overwritten in the crash. I figured reflashing it may bring it back to life but sadly it hasn't. The reflash seemed to go fine however. I guess I'll have to re-order another.

I wasn't happy with the delivery service I got from amazon - I had a status of delivered but nothing arrived at my door - it then took a week of chasing to find the package and get it delivered properly. I'll just ask for my money back from amazon and get it from elsewhere. I should say I normally get good service from amazon though. Any good suggestions for a good source?

Mike

My new one appeared through the post today and works great.
Already reflashed it and loaded a loads of progs.
Just got to try and understand it all now.

Mike