Reading this thread I am struck by the thought that the world really is divided into those who can operate gadgets and those who have problems (I fall into the last category).
I had to smile at one of the contributions above in which we are informed that the Sony MD recorder is easy and merely requires mastering a 24 branch decision tree (with subsections). I could probably just about cope with 5 options: 'on', 'off', 'record', 'stop recording', 'transfer files to computer' - I can't even imagine why you might need (at least) 19 more!