Power button/slide broken?

I’m going on a trip tomorrow on a plane, and I realized that all electronics have to be off during take-off and landing, but the problem is that I think the power button/slide on my Sansa is broken. I can slide it back and forth, but nothing happens. The only way I can turn it on is to connect the Fuze to my laptop and it only turns off during a specific amount of time. And now, there’s this red dot on top of the slide. I don’t plan on taking my laptop onto the plane since my mom won’t let me anyway.

I took a picture from my webcam (I apologize about the poor quality) to explain what I mean by the red dot;  [link]

I’m not certain what caused this, but I remember there was this one time when the Sansa fell out of my pocket, and the slide didn’t work anymore.

It’s going to be a long trip and I’d really like to listen to music to pass the time, but I don’t want to make the plane crash or anything from leaving my Sansa on. I was thinking it didn’t matter since I always have my digital watch and Tamagotchis on, but I searched around Google, and I don’t want to risk anything.

I was wondering if there’s possibly a way to fix it manually or the only way to fix it would be to take it to the place where I purchased it and have them fix it.

Thanks.

The red dot indicates that the fuze is locked. In this position it can still play music and stuff, but none of the controls work unless you take it off of lock mode, by sliding the slide to the middle.

To lock the fuze, pull the slide all the way down.

Every fuze has this.

To turn it off, try resetting it, push the slide up until the fuze turns black. This could take around 15 secs.

I have had my Sansa Fuze for a couple of years now, and use it daily at work and when working out.  (I also had the previous incarnation, before it went swimming and died.)  Yesterday, when I tried to turn it off, the power button broke.  It has alwasy been hard to slide (to prevent it from accidently turning off?), but all of a sudden it sort of snapped, and now it slides way too easily.  Like the previous user, it won’t turn on when I slide the button to “power,” and it also won’t lock when I slide it to “lock.”  Does anyone know if this is a fixable problem?  Or should I just buy a new one?  (That would be a bummer!)

Thanks!