Reports continue to pour in from users around the country of failures and lockups of their Microsoft 30GB Zune music players. Did your Zune crash? Share your story with us.
16 Comments
Todd said:
Just check my Zune after hearing this story.... Sure enough! My Zune is stuck on the "Zune Loading Screen" Hope they can release a fix for it?
Rebecca Knight said:
I was trying to fall asleep when it just stopped. I started freaking out. I have been trying all day to fix it and even was going to send it in to get fix for $140.00. I am so glad i turned on the news to see it wasn't just me. I hope they fix it soon and that I won't have to pay!!!
Rebecca K,Mead WA
Gary said:
Sure enough it froze up is there a recall ordered yet on the 30 gig zunes or am i stuck with a 200.00 paper weight
Becky said:
So I went to Zune.net and here is what they have to say so far. Let's hope it works.
My Zune 30 is frozen. What should I do?
Follow these steps:
Disconnect your Zune from USB and AC power sources.
Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain—this is good. Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.
Wait until after noon GMT on January 1, 2009 (that's 7 a.m. Eastern or 4 a.m. Pacific time).
Connect your Zune to either a USB port on the back or your computer or to AC power using the Zune AC Adapter and let it charge.
Once the battery has sufficient power, the player should start normally. No other action is required—you can go back to using your Zune!
jacob said:
I was playing Hex on my Zune When I was interrupted so I paused my game. when I came back to my game, the screen was frozen .I blamed my girl friend for the whole thing. all day. then I get it all thrown in my face while watching NWCN don't worry this wont stop me from watching.
Seattle Mom said:
I am a single working mom and NO Microsoft this is NOT an ""inconvenience"" I will NOT buy a Zune or Microsoft player again!
I use our Zune to drown out the drug deals/prostitute sales going on at the Shell station on the corner of Denny and N. Queen Anne. The prospect of a crashed gadget costing over $150 is a major stress for me! I lost a night of sleep looking for the solution. How long has M$ kept this bug from the press to save face? I Googled all last night trying to fix our Zune and only this afternoon (an hour before the Seattle press started to air the story) found what was happening.
I use our Zune on Metro to stay sane while I work 4 jobs (Yes I work today and tomorrow! I dug out our old Creative Zen so I had music on Metro)! This is not a toy. I am not part of your little street gang 'social' and if that is who you are aiming your PR to I will save and buy the more expensive yet FREE MARKET Creative products.
What brain damage programmer 'forgets' about leap year?! M$ is saying to the consumer their products will not last 4 years so why bother programming for this event? And now they say the loss of the use of this product for TWO NIGHTS is no problem to THEM and we do not count?
I do know the over priced M$ shuttles stop in front of the Key Arena at 7:50 AM during the week to pick up these over paid M$ employees, how about a nice Zune protest Monday morning to get OUR message to M$ ""YES the loss of our Zune for 2 nights is a major DAMAGE!""
Kat said:
It's bad enough when you're in the middle of your favorite game and the battery dies. What is even worse when you're right about to adavance to the next level, your favorite song is blasting in your ears and then...... NOTHING.. . . . Not oh no the song is over, not oops that was a bad move, no this was NOTHING, it all stopped and all I was left there with was this box with a ZUNE screen on it. Thanks a bunch Microsoft, gotta love Quality products.... I now remember why I use UBUNTU and not Windows.
erv said:
zune? i dont know what that is and with all thats going on in the world im not sure i care, one being this blago scandal. to start with i never saw his face before this and when i did i looked at those beady little eyes and how close they were together and thought the only thing missing is the bananna. maybe he got that way from trying to get his zune to work....
Chris said:
Got the same freeze. We'll find out tomorrow morning at 7am whether MS has identified the software problem at fault or (hopefully not) this is more BS like the xbox 360 hardware issues. Check the website for instructions. I'm inclined to believe the leap year story since it happened simultaneously to so many units. We shall see.
"Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with Windows"
Seattle Mom said:
Found a bit more information -- AFAIK, the clock is set by downloading a file from Microsoft's DRM servers (to make it hard to mess with the clock and therefore listen to expired Zune Pass tracks), so your PC time doesn't even matter. -- Off the Zuneboards talking about opening the Zune to reset the battary (NOT a good idea).
So our loss of 2 nights use of OUR Zune is M$ trying to stop a few kids from listening to old tracks. The board also posted the code and the comment it will happen again in another 4 years and M$ is NOT planning to fix it -- I mean as far as they see how many of us will still have a Zune 30 in 4yrs? Another great reason not to have any M$ product!
bjeffery said:
DOH OPPS SORRY
Jimmy said:
Wait.... people actually OWN Zunes? HAHA that's classic....
Harold Olsen said:
I do not own a Zune or any other MP3 player. If I did buy an MP3 player it would not be one that Microsoft puts out. It seems that their products are always full of bugs. Each version of the Windows Operating Systems is always worse than the previous one. The last version of Windows I actually liked was Windows 3.1. What really irritates me about Microsoft is that when something of this nature happens they deny that their product is buggy, which gives them an excuse to not fix the problem because, in their mind, there is nothing to fix. I do have a Windows Operating System in my computer but, other than that, I use very few, if any, Microsoft products and software. As far as I'm concerned, buying Microsoft products is just throwing your money away.
cm said:
I have 2 Zunes and letting them run down and then recharging them did indeed fix them up. Though I'll give you that forgetting about leapyear in your software programming and having your product not work for two days is totally unexcusable, it hardly rises to the level of "let's get together and have a public protest" level.
cm said:
I have 2 Zunes and letting them run down and then recharging them did indeed fix them up. Though I'll give you that forgetting about leapyear in your software programming and having your product not work for two days is totally unexcusable, it hardly rises to the level of "let's get together and have a public protest."
The Zune's real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since January 1st, 1980. When the Zune's clock is accessed, the driver turns the number of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/seconds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite.
The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date and time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of the date:
Code:
year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */
while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}
Under normal circumstances, this works just fine. The function keeps subtracting either 365 or 366 until it gets down to less than a year's worth of days, which it then turns into the month and day of month. Thing is, in the case of the last day of a leap year, it keeps going until it hits 366. Thanks to the if (days > 366), it stops subtracting anything if the loop happens to be on a leap year. But 366 is too large to break out of the main loop, meaning that the Zune keeps looping forever and doesn't do anything else.
The unfortunate part is that there isn't anything that can be done to fix this besides somehow changing what the clock is set to (which is exactly what the battery disconnection trick ends up doing). As this bug is in a chip manufactured by Toshiba, their PMP's are also affected by this bug.
Just check my Zune after hearing this story.... Sure enough! My Zune is stuck on the "Zune Loading Screen" Hope they can release a fix for it?
I was trying to fall asleep when it just stopped. I started freaking out. I have been trying all day to fix it and even was going to send it in to get fix for $140.00. I am so glad i turned on the news to see it wasn't just me. I hope they fix it soon and that I won't have to pay!!!
Rebecca K,Mead WA
Sure enough it froze up is there a recall ordered yet on the 30 gig zunes or am i stuck with a 200.00 paper weight
So I went to Zune.net and here is what they have to say so far. Let's hope it works.
My Zune 30 is frozen. What should I do?
Follow these steps:
Disconnect your Zune from USB and AC power sources.
Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain—this is good. Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.
Wait until after noon GMT on January 1, 2009 (that's 7 a.m. Eastern or 4 a.m. Pacific time).
Connect your Zune to either a USB port on the back or your computer or to AC power using the Zune AC Adapter and let it charge.
Once the battery has sufficient power, the player should start normally. No other action is required—you can go back to using your Zune!
I was playing Hex on my Zune When I was interrupted so I paused my game. when I came back to my game, the screen was frozen .I blamed my girl friend for the whole thing. all day. then I get it all thrown in my face while watching NWCN don't worry this wont stop me from watching.
I am a single working mom and NO Microsoft this is NOT an ""inconvenience"" I will NOT buy a Zune or Microsoft player again!
I use our Zune to drown out the drug deals/prostitute sales going on at the Shell station on the corner of Denny and N. Queen Anne. The prospect of a crashed gadget costing over $150 is a major stress for me! I lost a night of sleep looking for the solution. How long has M$ kept this bug from the press to save face? I Googled all last night trying to fix our Zune and only this afternoon (an hour before the Seattle press started to air the story) found what was happening.
I use our Zune on Metro to stay sane while I work 4 jobs (Yes I work today and tomorrow! I dug out our old Creative Zen so I had music on Metro)! This is not a toy. I am not part of your little street gang 'social' and if that is who you are aiming your PR to I will save and buy the more expensive yet FREE MARKET Creative products.
What brain damage programmer 'forgets' about leap year?! M$ is saying to the consumer their products will not last 4 years so why bother programming for this event? And now they say the loss of the use of this product for TWO NIGHTS is no problem to THEM and we do not count?
I do know the over priced M$ shuttles stop in front of the Key Arena at 7:50 AM during the week to pick up these over paid M$ employees, how about a nice Zune protest Monday morning to get OUR message to M$ ""YES the loss of our Zune for 2 nights is a major DAMAGE!""
It's bad enough when you're in the middle of your favorite game and the battery dies. What is even worse when you're right about to adavance to the next level, your favorite song is blasting in your ears and then...... NOTHING.. . . . Not oh no the song is over, not oops that was a bad move, no this was NOTHING, it all stopped and all I was left there with was this box with a ZUNE screen on it. Thanks a bunch Microsoft, gotta love Quality products.... I now remember why I use UBUNTU and not Windows.
zune? i dont know what that is and with all thats going on in the world im not sure i care, one being this blago scandal. to start with i never saw his face before this and when i did i looked at those beady little eyes and how close they were together and thought the only thing missing is the bananna. maybe he got that way from trying to get his zune to work....
Got the same freeze. We'll find out tomorrow morning at 7am whether MS has identified the software problem at fault or (hopefully not) this is more BS like the xbox 360 hardware issues. Check the website for instructions. I'm inclined to believe the leap year story since it happened simultaneously to so many units. We shall see.
"Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with Windows"
Found a bit more information -- AFAIK, the clock is set by downloading a file from Microsoft's DRM servers (to make it hard to mess with the clock and therefore listen to expired Zune Pass tracks), so your PC time doesn't even matter. -- Off the Zuneboards talking about opening the Zune to reset the battary (NOT a good idea).
So our loss of 2 nights use of OUR Zune is M$ trying to stop a few kids from listening to old tracks. The board also posted the code and the comment it will happen again in another 4 years and M$ is NOT planning to fix it -- I mean as far as they see how many of us will still have a Zune 30 in 4yrs? Another great reason not to have any M$ product!
DOH OPPS SORRY
Wait.... people actually OWN Zunes? HAHA that's classic....
I do not own a Zune or any other MP3 player. If I did buy an MP3 player it would not be one that Microsoft puts out. It seems that their products are always full of bugs. Each version of the Windows Operating Systems is always worse than the previous one. The last version of Windows I actually liked was Windows 3.1. What really irritates me about Microsoft is that when something of this nature happens they deny that their product is buggy, which gives them an excuse to not fix the problem because, in their mind, there is nothing to fix. I do have a Windows Operating System in my computer but, other than that, I use very few, if any, Microsoft products and software. As far as I'm concerned, buying Microsoft products is just throwing your money away.
I have 2 Zunes and letting them run down and then recharging them did indeed fix them up. Though I'll give you that forgetting about leapyear in your software programming and having your product not work for two days is totally unexcusable, it hardly rises to the level of "let's get together and have a public protest" level.
I have 2 Zunes and letting them run down and then recharging them did indeed fix them up. Though I'll give you that forgetting about leapyear in your software programming and having your product not work for two days is totally unexcusable, it hardly rises to the level of "let's get together and have a public protest."
The Zune's real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since January 1st, 1980. When the Zune's clock is accessed, the driver turns the number of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/seconds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite.
The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date and time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of the date:
Code:
year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */
while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}
Under normal circumstances, this works just fine. The function keeps subtracting either 365 or 366 until it gets down to less than a year's worth of days, which it then turns into the month and day of month. Thing is, in the case of the last day of a leap year, it keeps going until it hits 366. Thanks to the if (days > 366), it stops subtracting anything if the loop happens to be on a leap year. But 366 is too large to break out of the main loop, meaning that the Zune keeps looping forever and doesn't do anything else.
The unfortunate part is that there isn't anything that can be done to fix this besides somehow changing what the clock is set to (which is exactly what the battery disconnection trick ends up doing). As this bug is in a chip manufactured by Toshiba, their PMP's are also affected by this bug.