Finally.
Last friday, I took courage in my little hands and went to see the techie friend who I've had on stand-by to perform the actual task for ages. I took with me the Word printout which I downloaded from this site (can't remember exactly where), and the relevant pages from the pdf of the 505's internals, also downloaded from a link on MR.
It took a short while for him to find the right screwdriver etc amongst his father's tools. His long nails performed the job of the spatula like thing shown on the youtube vid for sliding open the reader. There were a few hitches, namely, sliding the top section (where the on/off button is) off the unit, but he persisted and eventually succeeded.
I couldn't stand it. My baby. My 505. Having an operation which might kill him or make him like new; so I dug my head into a new zentangle book which had arrived from Amazon and tried to ignore the groans of doubt coming from Nigel, the techie. He's a pessimist, and kept saying things like: "I can't get the top off," "I'm not sure that this is going to work" etc. I made encouraging noises and tried to ignore him, occasionally raising my head above the parapet, taking notice and giving advice, then hiding in my book again.
Eventually the battery was in and the reader was reassembled apart from the two end bits. I decided it was wise to leave the reader charging for a while and go for lunch. This would obviate the need to dissasemble the end bits if something was wrong (like the connector). So we left my precious 505 face down on a soft towel with a charger up his bum.
A few hours later we returned. All was well. Nigel switched my 505 on and it came to life! He then reinserted the SD card. Oh dear. The ereader was bricked. So I took a pointy tool and pressed the reset. Life! 505 began to restart. And buffer. And buffer. And buffer.
We chatted for around 30 nervous minutes while the buffering continued. We looked at the reader: it was switched on, but had lost two bars of power. I thought this was either the strain of the reset and SD card, or that the battery indicator wasn't calibrated properly, or even that the battery needed a long overnight charge.
I got home at around 2am and put the reader on charge (I have one of Sony's chargers). Twelve hours later I woke up (it had been a stressful day), took the reader off charge and....touch wood....it's been fine since. I've been reading about 70 pages a day and haven't lost a bar yet.
I've had the battery for around a year but am hoping it hasn't deteriorated in the drawer. It took ages to drum up the courage to have it changed; meanwhile, I've been reading while it's been plugged in, which hasn't been too much of an issue.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
