In today’s “Fringe Interest”, we talk about a problem that affects the Sony Clie NX70 pda, specifically my Sony Clie NX70 pda, and if our lord and master Google is to be believed, no one else. In case anyone is left scratching their heads over this issue in the future, here’s how to rid yourself of this damn spot. If you’ve got a problem, yo, I’ll solve it, check out the hook as the DJ revolves it.

Ice, ice, baby, Vanilla Ice, ice baby.

Um, sorry. While Vanilla Ice is certainly a problem, it’s probably not the one at hand. However, if for some strange reason you’re trying to play an MP3 from this horrible man, it may well be. These sentences come to you courtesy of the Seamless Linking Corporation, all rights reserved.

The problem is described thus – on slapping your MP3 files in the appropriate directory for the Sony Audioplayer app to find them, it bafflingly only plays about two seconds of them before skipping on to the next. This is teeth grindingly frustrating, especially when the solution is something not hugely intuitive, albeit something that admittedly should already have been done as best practise.

Essentially, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest Sony drivers to allow the Clie to support the Memory Stick Pro, not just the standard, out-of-the-box support for common or garden Memory Stick. Yeah, yeah, obviously you should have put this on already but note this – without the driver the Clie happily recognises and uses the MSPro, and most apps save to and run from MSPro without the driver. Also, as the driver isn’t stored in the permanent flash memory, after a hard reset it doesn’t get automatically restored along with the rest of the system.

Which as it turns out was my problem, as I knew I’d installed it so didn’t bother checking, making for weeks of frustrating irrelevant setting tweaking. Conveniently, I’d forgotten about having to do a hard reset that had removed it in the interim. One three second install later and the problem evaporates.

So concludes this episode of “Fringe Interest”, we hope you have found it both entertaining and informative.