Kobo desktop is a great advertisement for Calibre

[moz]

I just bought (another) Kobo reader after killing my Aura trying to open it up after it corrupted itself. The registration process was awful, and Kobo online support was useless "uninstall, download again, disable your firewall and antivirus... oh, it still doesn't work? Buy a wifi router and use that"... thanks, great advice. Updating over wifi at work is what corrupted the firmware on my last device.

In the end I used an old hard drive from my old laptop, booted off that, ran the old desktop app (which automatically updated) and activated my device. Using Windows 7. Hooray. I was surprised that I could even boot off a USB hard drive... lucky!

Then the thing started syncing books I've already read to the device, then updating dictionaries... and cancelling didn't work. So I unplugged it and got the "you have set up your device" message. Which, amazingly, appears to be correct.

Now I can use Calibre and be happy. What an enormous PITA.