My archos 7 boots up ok but then the interface is not responding... i can re set and use the paperclip method and even remove the battery but it is still frozen on reboot..it may work once in six attempts... the unit is 1 week old can you suggest cheers Bernard Miller

With an 800x480 pixel-wide resolution and a 7" TFT LCD screen, the ARCHOS 7 can absolutely provide users with the best cinema experience on the go. You can watch your movies in full width, which will give you the same viewing comfort as a TV in your living room. Your video watching experience on the go will never look so good.
Because of the excellent cinema experience, and its huge capacity - both 160G and 320G versions are having enough room to store movies, more and more users would like to copy their DVD collections to the handheld device. To copy a commercial DVD to the ARCHOS 7, you need a program called Pavtube DVD Ripper to rip it into ARCHOS 7 compatible file formats, like AVI, MPEG4, AVI video, and WMA, AAC, WAV audio. The following paragraphs will detail the steps of how to rip DVDs for playback on ARCHOS 7, if you are searching for such a solution, just read on it to get what you need.
First of all, you can download Pavtube DVD Ripper here.

Step 1: Load DVD files
Click "DVD Rom", "DVD Folder" or "IFO/ISO" to import DVD files to this program. This utility allows users selecting their needed chapters to convert, and you can right click on a title, and then do selections on the popup window, like "Uncheck All", "Show Chapters", etc. By the way, usually, the one with the longest duration time is the main movie, so just tick off this one would be OK.
Step 2: Select output format for ARCHOS 7
Click on the pull down menu of "Format", and then all the format profiles will be listed out as below, just select "Archos" firstly, and then choose a format for ARCHOS 7, here I select "Archos 5/7 WMV Video (*.wmv) for instance.
Step 3: Set advanced settings
Click "Settings" button, then you are able to adjust video and audio parameters like codec, bit rate, aspect ration, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, and audio channel in the following interface. Basically, the default settings can ensure the output quality to be good, so, if you do not have special requirements, there is no need to change the settings.

Step 4: Click "Convert" button to start DVD ripping
Once your DVD is ripped, you can find out the output files via clicking on "Open" button, and then drag the file over to your ARCHOS 7 for playback.

For more: http://www.pavtube.com/dvd_ripper/