Return to Zen

In my previous post, I talked about the untimely death of my Creative Zen Micro and my plans to replace it. I’d forgotten at the time about EBay!

I’m pleased to report that only one lost auction later, I was the proud owner of a Creative Zen in the exact same color scheme as my old one.

It included everything from the original package plus a new extra battery. So now I have four 12 hour batteries. I can Zen my butt off now for 48 hours straight! And for a fraction of the price of a new player.
It even included the earphones, which I promptly threw in the trash.
As an added bonus, the player was loaded with a very eclectic music collection. Like some kind of digital audio voyeurs, my wife and I actually took the player on our date last Friday and listened to all the weird music in the car and tried to figure out what it told us about the guy who sold it to me.

When I went to plug it into Windows 7, I was bummed that it wouldn’t work. After some searching, I realized that I needed to update the firmware to the version released in 2005 that didn’t need special drivers anymore.
You can only do this process on Windows XP, but the amazing (!!!!) XP Compatibility Mode in Windows 7 came to my rescue and that all worked perfectly.
Apparently I did this before with my old one, but you’ll have to forgive my forgetting, since I did it FOUR YEARS AGO!!!

My new old Zen is now happily dispensing karma in my car and I’m again able to secretly listen to music from Evita and Les Mis – which doesn’t necessarily make me gay – but, I admit, it doesn’t help.