pato’s “blog”

I own since quite some years an Archos AV480 (or also Archos AV400 80GB edition called) http://www.archos.com which has started to loose some of it’s battery power. The battery was down to around 40-50% of it’s original capacity and loosing a few percent every few weeks.

So it was time for me to get a new battery. Sadly the player doesn’t support an exchangeable battery, but it’s quite easy to replace it.

The problem is, I wasn’t able to find a single manual on the net on how to do it, this is why I wrote this manual here.

So first of all you need a new battery. I found a high quiality one here at http://www.infinitybatteries.com/p-14073-archos-pocket-video-recorder-av400-80gb-music-player-battery-3150mah-li-ion-polymer.aspx. The best thing about them, they only ask for 2.95$ US shipping cost, globally!

I received the battery a few days after ordering, including 3 free screwdrivers (a Torx 5 (not needed), a flat head 1 and a phillips 0.5) plus a plastic opening piece.

So it got time to get started, here my player.

Small warning before you begin, this guide is only for people who know how to solder!

Time to remove all visible screws now. You should have 8 small ones and 2 slightly bigger screws. Do not mix them up

This is what it should look like after you removed the screws and allready tried to open it a little.

Now comes the absolutely hardest part of the whole tutorial. Get the thing open…
You can push the plastic corners gently up and while doing that, use your scredriver or better a plastic piece, to pop the backside open. t’s not mounted or something, just very hard to get away. Please note that you need to start to open it on the side pictured above, as the other side has a latch which keeps you from removing it.
Here a bit further.


The risk is now VERY! big that you destroy the plastic a little. At least I did brake it, but it is still somehow holding together and keeping the dust out
After you got it now this far you can gently push it to the compactlash slot to finally open it.

Yes, this little small latch was a problem to open it.
Here where it was sticked in.

But yes, it is open now
Time to remove those two etal latches and also the black stickers at the harddrive screws.

Under the two stickers are screws hidden. Remove them.

Now you can gently lift the harddrive. Under it is our target, the battery.

Gently remove the IDE plug without denting the pins. Do not use force!

Time to unpack the new battery now.

Remove now the old battery. Watch out, mine was sticked to a chip on the board. So slowly push it up, it will loosen itself, just do it slow.

The open player.

You need to unsolder now the old cables from the board. As mentioned before, do that only if you have soldering experience, otherwise you kill the player.

Now solder the new one onto the board. And yes I know, my soldering is horrible But it works, that’s what counts

After this is done it’s time to assemble it.

That’s it, it’s assembled again
Now load the player at least 3 hours and hope it won’t explode