The programming rotary switch on mine broke years ago but it did not overly concern me as I always used the laptop via USB to make patches. When the same little middle bit of the USB socket lost itself out of mine, as it mysteriously seems to have done on so many others and no other USB device I have ever heard of, my extremely over priced and mediocre sounding multi effects unit became useless junk. I made a few enquiries and located a source for both parts ($20, $12 of which was postage) and thought "well what have I got to loose". Watched what videos I could find and spent the next 4 hours trying to get the USB socket to budge. LOL. They only said it was hard in the videos, not impossible. A bit more research later and I arrived home with a larger soldering iron and desoldering braid. It worked. After a lot of hassle I got all board contacts clean and ready. I have soldered in the new socket and tried to test before reassembly ( have decided to hold off on replacing switch for the moment)
Problem is my laptop is still not finding the HD500. I'm not about to try replacing a chip, especially with no guarantee that that will fix the problem. I have checked all contacts with a multimeter and none are shorting and all are connecting to the board. The only other factor I can think of is maybe there is some earth component missing which may be corrected in reassembly.
The only thing left to do is reassemble the device and test it. If it does not work it will go in the bin. I will have a permanent reminder etched in my brain for ever. "Do not buy anything from Line 6 again."
That my friends is what customer service is ultimately all about.
