I want my older Zen back.

Question

I have had a Creative Zen for well over a year. It was the one with the switch on the side. It finally fried one day. Just up and died. I shoulda and still may send it in for repair. It gave me soooo much troublefree enjoyment. I used it mainly on long motorcycle tri
ps.
The battery would usually last a full 6 hours making for a really enjoyable ride. I believe I put well over 60,000 miles on that ZEN and I about cried when it died. It's still setting here on the table in front of me.
But it died.
I bought a ZEN MX thinking it would be at least as good if not better. Ooo
ps.
.. I was mystaken. First thing and most iritating was the tracks skipped. It wasn't unusual to get a little blip, almost every track. I didn't mind the no switches thing that the ZEN MX uses. It was tolerable at best. I didn't try setting up a playlist or anything. I just let it play. But low an behold, after a month, it died. I sent it in for repair and Creative sent me a new one under warranty.
The new one came, scared me to death. I figured it didn't work when I plugged it in. No display. I left it plugged in for several hours. It turned out the battery was totally dead. I loaded it up with songs and off I went. It was OK, none of the songs skipped that i noticed. That was last Monday, today is Friday.
I went for a ride today and guess what. It just quit after about 5 songs. I had to stop the bike and reboot. It went through it's scanning disk and rebuilding speal. Then it started off with the same song it has started off with when I left the house. Wierd... About 0 songs went buy and it quit again. Same thing. I can't have it doing that when I'm riding. I rebooted and it went through the same rebuild speal again. Started off with the same song again also. So I thought, maybe if I build a playlist. So I did. I tried to load the playlist. It just sets there and says please wait. For hours and hours. I couldn't shut it off, it just set there, please wait. So I pushed the reset button. I get home and try building a playlist with Creative Central. The program read the ZEN ok but... I built a playlist and uploaded it. Once again, please wait.
I NEVER had problems like this with the old ZEN with switches. I had several playlists which played flawlessly. I never had a skip, I never had a lockup. It was the cat's meow.
Do you think Creative might be interested in putting the quality of the old ZEN back into the new ones. I read the forums and I'm not the only one having these problems. I'm just very dissapointed. A great product that went to heck in a handbag.
I know Creative has the ability to fix it. Please Do....
Thanks

Answer 1

Yea, I normally read the reviews before I buy a product. when I bought my first ZEN a bit over a year ago the customer reviews were great, nobody was having any troubles at all. I didn't read the customer reviews on the ZEN MX, if I had I wouldn't have bought it. I just assumed since it was a ZEN it would be good. Well it's not a ZEN, it's a ZEN MX and it's nowhere near as good as the ZEN was. I listened to it all day today, every third or forth song skipped somewhere in the song. It didn't shut down like was mentioned in the original post but for some strange reason when I shut it off and turned it back on it always started with the same song regardless of what the last song was that was playing before I shut it off. Wierd.... AND I just don't see how they could have messed up enough to cause the ZEN MX to not read long filenames in the playlist as I read in another post. That makes the playlist part of the ZEN MX completely useless. One more thing. I have a 6 gig card with a directory of a special group of favorite somgs and a directory of albums. The original ZEN would read the songs out of the directory. The ZEN MX groups the two directorys as one plus I'm pretty sure it mixes songs from the main Music directory. What a mess.
I do have one good thing to say. When the first MX died, Creative was quick to send a new one. I was only down about a week and a half total. The bad part is the waranty is only good for the remaining waranty period of the first ZEN MX.