Well, now I'm really angry. Last week I bought a Creative Zen Mp3 player. It worked fine for the first few days, and I was really impressed by it. Nice interface, easy to use, and great picture quality. I loaded some Soprano's on it and watched on the bus home in glee. "This device is going to be awesome" I thought to myself happily.
It was then that the horror began. After 2-3 days, it COMPLETELY STOPPED WORKING. The damn thing was frozen on it's system reboot menu, and nothing worked properly. I had stupidly tried to update the firmware on it, which Creative advised to do. After trying all their troubleshooting advice, and none of it working, I took to the internets to solve the problem. On the Creative forums, I found out that massive bunch of people had the same problem, which was that their players had effectively been turned into paperweights by the official firmware update. See here for more info. Turns out there is some kind of compatability problem with the Creative Firmware and Media PLayer 11. What is most interesting though, is that these posts originated from 2006, and the download is STILL AVAILABLE on their site. GAH! Anyway, after wasting hours trying to troubleshoot the problem, I finally fixed it by rolling back my version of Media Player and reinstalling everything. Creative doesn't seem to want to take responsibilty at all for this problem though.
The next day was spent happily enjoying my player. Everything worked fine, and although I was a bit miffed about the previous debacle, I put it behind me and though "well these things happen". Now, just randomly, the screen has stopped working. It plays music fine, but the screen is just white. So after owning it for only a week max, I have had two major problems, the second one which I can't even fix because without a screen I can't even go into the menu's. Add to this, my computer won't even recognise the drive when its attached. It is pure horror. The screen seems to display sometimes though. I would say, about 20% of the time when I turn it on, the screen displays properly.
So now, I'm going to continue to waste time trying to fix it, and if that doesn't work, I'm going right back to the store to demand a refund which I probably won't get. Once again, the amzing thing is the amount of people on the internet who have also registered such a problem, and the complete lack of information given offically by Creative. Once you buy their product, it seems they no longer care. I have been a Creative fan for some time now, and I will continue to buy their products after this. Even if I manage to get a store credit, I will use it to buy a different Creative Mp3 player which hopefully won't have the same problems (because I don't want an iPod). In the eventuality that I do fix it, should I really have to waste all my time with this bullshit when I just want to be listening to musc? HELL NO.
Creative... SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.
Has anyone else had problems like this with their media players?