I saw that a Central was being auctioned on eBay a few weeks ago. The seller said that it worked fine, except for the fact that the CD wouldn't copy any more music to the hard drive. The opening bid was $200, IIRC, and so I thought "What the heck", a guy can always use another Central.

So I placed a late bid of something like $225 on it and ended up winning the unit.

Then I receive it, and plug it in. Sure enough, something's not right. It takes about 10 minutes to boot up. But it finally does.

There's some music on it, but nothing I'm interested in and the bit rate was lower than I use.

So I think I'll just pop it open and see about upgrading the HD. Maybe that'll help the bootup.

I pop open the case and see that the HD/CD assembly has been "Tweaked" inside. I see that the problem seems to be that the CD drive couldn't open the hinged doors on the front of the case; it looks like it was wedged at a slight angle. Maybe the unit was banged around, or perhaps dropped. Funny thing, though, is that everything else inside was fine...The only casualty inside is that one of the plasric mounting posts for the HD/CD assembly was cracked and it wasn't mounted quite right. Maybe someone got into it and gorked it a bit, not sure.

So I disassemble the unit, upgrade the hard drive, work on the mounting a bit to restore some integrity to it and untweak it. I also replaced the IDE cable because it didn't look "right".

The unit powered up just fine, and then it popped the CD drive open since nothing was on the HD yet. I was able to install the new 1.10 software just fine. While the outside of the case has a scratch or two, the unit has worked well without any other problems to date....

Anyways, I did my "external drive bay" modification, and have been using the unit for the past few weeks...I may end up taking it to work at some point, not sure...

That makes a fleet of 3 Centrals for me...One that I bought new three years ago (how time flies!), one from the Overstock.com clearance awhile back and now this one....Maybe I should change my handle to something like "The Central Guy" (Ha!).....

Randy