After my Sony Minidisk player went on the fritz I tried to find a good substitute which I could use to listen to music while at school and basically traveling. After comparring many models, such as the Nomad Zen and iPod, I (obviously) chose to grab an iPod. It looked great, had great reviews, and to say the least I looked forward to it everyday - and when it came, a day early, I was overjoyed. The first, oh, maybe five days it worked perfectly, and I absolutelly loved it, but, during a bit of a unlucky week, I suffered four power surges within an hour, which happened to both knock my off the internet and dispell some odd items on my iPod (presumedly). I had it charging in the cradle, firewire and all, and the next day when I was on the way to school I noticed that it had nothing on it. Alright, I can deal with that, all I really need to do it simply reupload the songs (and go through the pain of renaming genre's for 4k tracks)... but, I found next, that I couldn't turn it off either. Not to mention that even though it had no music on it, it read that it had full capacity open, 84483982 tracks on it, and about thirty entrys under genre... although none of them had titles, and just arrows. I also managed to find out that a week after I bought the 30gb, the 40gb model came out for the same price - that wasn't a nice thing to notice.

Needless to say I couldn't leave the iPod in the car due to where I live (temperatures can reach ~120 farenheit in the car), so I locked it and had to carry it around school the rest of the day (which wasn't the biggest problem because of it's slim size). I decided to let it run out of batteries and see what happens.

The next day, after leaving it alone and on for all night, I plugged it in and miracuously it worked perfectly, and all of the tracks were still on the iPod and listenable. I left it plugged in for the day, and when I returned home I unhooked it to find, oh joy, that it was frozen at exactly 1:59 pm. Nothing worked on it... and so, I put it away and let it run out of batteries. Tonight I picked it up and apparently it's working fine again, but for some reason I don't think it will stay that way.

I'm thinking that the surge could have damaged it in someway, and that I should probably whipe it clean and reset it, not to mention clean it, maybe find a different case, and some other items... so, would resetting it work well, or should I send it back and see if I could get it replaced under warranty? If I had it replaced, would I be able to upgrade to the 40gb as it was the same price?

Two more questions though - first, are their any thin leather cases with foldable covers which would still make it comfortable and easy to carry in a pocket? And second, after noticing how dirty it was, little scratches here and there, smudges, I tried to clean it with water and cotton swabs, cotton balls, paper towels and a towel, and it's done nothing. It's still all smudgy. Any easy, conventional ways to clean thumbprints and such off of it with home items?

Thanks for any support, I appreciate it.

Oh, edit, Generation 3 (?) 30gb iPod, Windows XP, using ephpod. On that note, I also have problems with the iPod being noticed under windows then "unmounting" itself automatically, leaving me helpless to upload.