June 22, 2009 12:51 PM

Hmm... there's a couple of things you can try. I'm under the impression that the Sansa Clip should just pop up on your computer as an external USB drive and needs no driver installation. But, I would try these things, in this order -

1. Did the Clip come with a software installation disk? Even if Windows is supposed to auto detect it, perhaps the disk comes with drivers you can manually install.

2. Try plugging the Clip into a different USB port on your machine. You're probably plugging it into a front port - give one of the back ports a try. In rare cases this might work.

3. Try restarting the Clip and your machine and plug it in again with both machines restarted fresh.

4. Try hard resetting the Clip (i.e., restore to factory settings) then attempting to sync it. It should already be factory... but worth a shot, and since you haven't loaded any music on it, you have no data to lose.

5. Try running a registry repair program on your PC (I would recommend CCleaner, it's free.) Perhaps something in the OS is borked that's making it confused, although this is unlikely to lead to your problem.

6. Try plugging it into another machine or someone else's computer. if it works on another machine and not on yours, then your PC has a problem. If it does not work on someone else's computer, perhaps you have a defective Clip.

Hope this helps!

Peter Redmer
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