Apparently, my failure to get the Zen Sleek to work wasn’t enough. Now, apparently because of all the modifications, upgrades, and changes I’ve made to my computer to try to make it play nice with the Sleek, plugging my headphones into the front jack (Creative soundcard!) no longer disables my PC speakers.
Jesus Christ, I wish I’d never heard of Creative.
I’m glad to hear good things about Sandisk. I’m getting the m250 for Christmas. It has all the features, and it uses flash memory so it won’t be as delicate as the hard drive players. And now that 2 gig flash memory chips are available, I should be able to fit all the decent songs in my collection onto my mp3 player. (I can’t be bothered to rip entire CDs onto my computer. I just took the good songs, and left all the crappy filler songs on the disk.)
I’ll just add in that my creative MP3 player, (a zen micro,) works like a charm so far, with playsForSure and everything. Won’t add anything more to the debate than that simple assurance. I’ve just discovered the joy of pairing it up with napster-to-go service, for all the music I could ever want and then some.
It has an excellent user interface, works perfectly for everyone I know who has one, is supported by a massive range of third-party accessories and feels like a really well-designed and well-engineered piece of equipment?
Anyhow, my suggestion is to either buy a really decent MP3 player (such as an iPod or iRiver or similar) or else get a cheap generic one which just looks like a flash disk to windows. The middle ground is nasty, especially as regards bundled software. iTunes frequently annoys, and yet it is about 75x better than most of the crap you get with MP3 players.
Wot you said. I actually cheered when helping my friend install a creative soundcard the other day. They have finally added an option to the install CD that says “Drivers only”. Now you can use the bundled CD without worrying about CreativeCentre or whatever infesting your PC. Woot!!!
Not one one the approximately 12,000 songs in my collection have any copyright protection. Most are good old MP3s with a few albums in unprotected AAC format.
That’s very strange. Stupid question: is it possible you are connecting it to USB1 ports? Have you tried plugging it into all of your USB ports? Do you know for a fact that you have USB2 on this computer? Are you using any sort of USB hub between the computer and the device? That’s really all I can think of that would allow it to connect to another computer and not to yours…
Yeah. Been down this road. 
I have all USB2 ports, and no hub. I’ve tried to connect it to every single one of my ports, with identical results on all of them.
Too many things are starting to go wrong with this PC. I think I’m at the cusp of FDISKing the thing and starting over…and the first thing I’ll reinstall after reupdating XP and my hardware drivers is the Zen. I’ll bet it’ll work then.
maniacal laugh
Do you know anyone else with a Windows XP computer you can hook the thing up to? What version of XP are you running, home or professional? What service pack?
If you do reinstall, try connecting the Zen before installing any Service Packs, then install them one at a time if you can.
I’m running XP Home with SP2. I believe the Zen is only supposed to run on SP2. At least, that’s what they tell you.
As for the other computer, I’m going to hook it up at work today to see what’s going on. Wish me luck, and thanks again.
OK, I did it. I cleared off my C drive. Rebuilt the machine. Installed all 30 billion XP updates that have come out since 2002 (but only after another frustrating saga…the saga of Why Won’t This Bleeping Computer Recognize the Ethernet Controller Drivers?) Guess what!
The freaking, goddamned, miserable, beautiful little Zen Sleek works like a fucking charm!
Oh my God. I am so much happier than I ever thought a simple piece of consumer electronics could make me. Course, that has very little to do with the player itself, and everything to do with the fact that I bulldogged through murky computer waters and forced a solution out of the reticent bastard.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Now if I could only get my sound card to work again.
My advice: Leave Norton out of the loop when you reinstall. That ppackage has given me NOTHING but trouble.
“It is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words… and this is the rock-solid principle on which the Corporation’s success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”
– hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Entry: Sirius Cybernetics corporation. Quote taken from “so long and thanks for all the fish” by Douglas Adams.
I don’t really believe that MP3 players are essentially useless or that this one necessarily has fundamental design flaws. But when you were talking about how irrationally happy it made you to get it working, I had to throw in that quote.
Yeah, me too. My Creative MP3 player just plugs into the USB drive and works flawlessly. I came with a CD full of drivers and such, which I pitched straight into the garbage.
Yeah. I sure as HELL left it out of the loop and just went with AVG Free.
And oh yes. Rick reminded me. I must now reluctantly offer a resigned apology to Creative and Microsoft for slagging their products. It turns out that it was my system that was the problem. Of course, in my defense, I must point out that I had no way of absolutely KNOWING that at the time, and indeed, the problem was so incredibly obscure and hidden that it took a complete reformat to correct it. Still, I was wrong.
ahemsorryahem
Sorry, hijack (and go, Ogre! Glad to know it’s working again for you, and you’re a very sweet, thoughtful gift giver :))–I’ve been using Norton on my computer for as long as I can remember, but now that I’m saving up for a new laptop, should I reconsider buying the 2006 Norton package?
It’s unnecessarily intrusive for ‘just’ a security package. In my particular case, I had a wifi card fail and the replacement wouldn’t start working correctly until I removed Norton. I’ve been a happy AVG user for quite a long time and only got the Norton product due to a bulk purchase from one of my cow-orkers. (Got it at a fair discount…still not worth the price after the hassle.)
Does that mean we can start slagging Dell? Cool. Where do I sign up?
For the record: My daughter got the same mp3 player you did. It was up and running perfectly in moments. (XP SP2 on my self-built workstation)
She loves it. I’ve played with it a little. The Creative software seems a bit clunky but the player is a cool little machine. If I were to use an mp3 player, I’d buy one of those.
Oh, was this NORTON? Shit, that wasn’t your fault. Ha ha ha!
Norton products are the work of Satan. I’ve never had anything but the worst sort of trouble with them, and neither has anyone else I know.
This sentence hurts my brain.