[iCowboy]

Hi,

My Windows laptop has gone to the big recycling heap in the sky, so I'm using VMWare Fusion to run Windows XP on an Intel MacBook. Everything else I've thrown at VMWare has worked perfectly, so I was hoping the Sony PRS-505 would be happy with this set-up, but alas things are rocky.

I'm in the UK with the UK version of the Reader which runs software version 1.2.00.18050. I've installed the Sony eBook Library and the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software on XP and they both worked perfectly. The 'free' books that came with the Reader install just fine as do free books from places like feedbooks.com.

However, when I want to buy a book, things go badly wrong. ADE sees the Reader and I can register it. I then tried to download a book from the Waterstones online store (Waterstones are the UK partner for Sony). The file transferred and looks fine inside ADE.

However, when I copied the file to the Reader's internal memory and unplugged it from the computer, things began to go wrong. The spinning refresh icon appeared and the Reader reset, rebooted, up came the refresh icon, reset, reboot - and so on and on and on...

I performed a hard reset on the Reader, re-registered it with ADE and tried installing the DRMed book on the SD card. After unplugging the Reader, it began to endlessly reboot just as before. Removing the card stopped the rebooting and the Reader behaved as normal. Delete the book from the card, plug it back in and the Reader is happy - so it's definitely something to do with the book or the DRM on the book.

(I can't download the book again, Waterstones have restricted users to one download per title - which kind of sucks. I *could* email them and ask them to unlock the DRM so I can make a second download, but I'm not impressed with their support).

I've also installed the Mac version of ADE, but doesn't seem to see the Reader, so I can't try copying the DRMed files using Mac ADE.

So - and this is a long shot - has anyone in the UK found a way of getting the Reader to work on a Mac using books bought from the Waterstones store??? If you have, please post some step-by-step instructions.

Many thanks, hopefully you can get me using this beautiful machine as intended!

Mike.