“MECHA ERROR” - A Bad Week Gets Worse
Published by ed August 24th, 2006 in UncategorizedThis has been a bad, very bad week for me. First off, this last week my household (me included) started eating healthy. For a guy that typically ate Doritos, frozen pizzas and guzzled copious amounts of soda each day for the past few years, this is a big shock to the system. And the other night, I only had 1 beer with my Tofu stir fry dinner. If this wasn’t bad enough, my week got worse…
Last night, I made some organic popcorn and sat down to watch the latest batch of DVD’s from Netflix using my beloved Toshiba SD4205 5-disc DVD player. Upon powering up the Toshiba, I get the following message “Welcome to Toshiba …… MECHA ERROR”. DOH, it doesn’t even try to play a disc! Luckily, I am a techy guy and use my skillz to try to fix it: I pound on the top of the player, pound on the sides, open the box up, shake the whole thing, shock myself on the power supply, and still all I get is “MECHA ERROR”. The Toshiba is officially dead.
So here I am today, drinking some iced Green Tea and I can’t watch my DVDs!!! On the good side, I have been thinking about buying a decent sized LCD TV to replace my old CRT. I can use this broken dvd player as momentum to get a TV and DVD player that play well together. Anyone have any DVD, LCD TV recommendations? DVD player with built in DVR? Wilson the techtoy geek better have some ideas…
Ed
Follow Up
8/25/06
So last night I fell off the health food wagon. I had some beers followed by a rib-eye steak, potatoes, and bottle of wine. With protein in my belly and a good buzz going I decide to have another shot at the Toshiba (I had to, it still had my Fight Club DVD in its belly). I whack it a few more times, take a bunch of screws out, but still can’t dislodge the DVD. I then start unhooking all of these ribbon connectors on the circuit boards, to gain a better angle for my utility knife, and in doing so I discover one of the ribbons was already disconnected. Doh! I reattach all, power up the player and bingo it’s fixed. I think this is a message from God, “Give up the health food, and keep drinking; otherwise, I will strike down your toys with great vengeance and furious anger!”
I definitely need to work on replacing this dvd player. The “Mecha Error” came briefly back the other night. So I remove the top again, make sure all of the ribbon connectors are snug, close it up, and once again fixed (temporarily?). I didn’t even zap myself on the power supply this time; for those that are dumb enough to try this to any hifi equipment that’s still plugged in, beware of the circuit board just in front of where the power cable connects to the device.
If anyone else reads this and has found a different solution to the mecha error, comment on it here.
-ed
Have you tried whiskey and some convincing foreplay?
Fricking DVD player is officially dead. Just ordered a new upconverting one. I guess this means I need to finally get an HDTV!