Leap-year glitch freezes Zune MP3 players

reply to post by johnsky
Hey, so i tried this and it worked... for a little bit...

After i got it working, i left for a little while and came back to find the battery had died, so I charged it and tried to turn it back on to find that instead of freezing at the loading screen, it freezes with a blank screen, like with just the backlight on... i can reset it with the play/up combination, but when i do that, it freezes at the loading screen... I've tried taking the battery out a few more times but nothing happens, it does the same thing... Do i have a different problem or does this just go along with everybody else's problem? Does anybody know what i can do to fix it since i probably won't be able to send it in since i have opened it?

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Mod Edit: Large quote snipped, 'reply to' added

[edit on 1/1/2009 by Badge01]

Hmmmmm..... My sniffer's gone off and I smell something bigger at work here.

Conspiracy theory off the top of my head:

The RIAA and Microsoft teamed up to rig this event. You send your players in to get them fixed and they sniff you player for any possible "illegal" songs. You show back up to pick up your player and you are served.

Hmmmm..... doubtful, but then again mankind is capable of anything these days. RIAA would try to pull a stunt like this if they could.

Hey all - according to Microsoft, the Zunes should be fine tomorrow - it's a leap year issue with the driver used in the Zune 30s...

forums.zune.net...

reply to post by stealthyone


Good find. Makes me surprised that all Zunes (not just 30 Gig models) didn't go down today.

I refuse to get any further involved with MS than i already am (Windows based OS, and hooked on MS Office, for business reasons). So i don't go Zune.

My wife has an IPod, which i really like (except for music compatibility issues).

I use a Siren MP3 player, personally...but that is just for me to listen to music in my car.

My oldest son uses an 8 gb Phillips MP3 Players.

My youngest son uses a 4 gb Phillips.

We don't get too fancy round the parts, but Zune is something that just hasn't appealed to me.

I have an 80 gig and it freezes and I have to wait for the battery to go dead before I can do anything because I dont know how to take the battery out.....grrrrr Microsoft sucks....

If it is a leap year/clock thing then it *might* correct itself when both your time zone and UTC have fully transitioned into 2009.

It might be worth leaving everything alone until tomorrow and then trying again.

Today is day 366 of the year. The fact that they all failed at the same time, points to a date/time related problem.

No-one learnt any lessons from Y2K by the look of things.

Well, my Zune crashed again.

So much for my previous post. It did start working again, now its not. GRRRRRR

reply to post by burdman30ott6


It's not just the 30-gig Zunes. My son's 80-gig Zune froze today just like the 30s.

Weird. This reminds me of when I was in Colorado Springs and the Army would occasionally do unknown things within Fort Carson that would send everyone's garage door openers haywire.

mass electronic interference,can it get any more obvious?,no one will see it of course,they can pretty much run riot and throw it in our faces and no one sees,for they cant comprehend future technological capabilities!

Originally posted by greeneyedleo
Well, my Zune crashed again.

So much for my previous post. It did start working again, now its not. GRRRRRR

It will be fixed...now, past midnight.

I dont use any of these tiny music players. Id rather hear my music on a nice large sound system that is comparable to a concert sound system and seriously shake the neighborhood, and the music come from the CD's or albums themselves instead of compressed lossy audio format.

As to the car, the plain ol in dash radio/CD player does just fine there. No need to make the doors or trunk rattle with subwoofer woolies.

Imagine, if this baffle level over a simple music player causes so many to go in a panic becuase they cant listen to simple music, what kind of bafffled panic mode will be caused if cell phones and bank comptuer systems and game consoles go poof!!



Cheers!!!!

Its unfortunate that the workaround doesn't seem to work for everyone.

In the ones I've seen work, it works, until you connect it to a PC again and allow it to update it's clock.

Most have just simply not connected it to a PC again and are awaiting a patch, but others seem to be able to connect it to the PC so long as they faked the date on the PC they're connecting it to.


The issue must be a little more complicated then than a simple date code misread.


To one of the above posters, you mentioned it locked again when you re-connected it to power?

That power source wouldn't happen to be your PC would it?

reply to post by RFBurns


Zune 30 is working fine now. There likely wasn't a conspiracy surrounding this, just a screw-up on Microsoft's testing practices.

However, what you say, RFBurns, about game consoles... I already went through the red rings of death on my 360 console. Even though I own virtually every video game console ever released in the states (Not bragging, it's a collection I started actively adding older consoles to in college when sites like ebay started gaining speed.) I found myself really bummed over not being able to play that particular console for the 3 week down time it took to get a replacement system delivered to me from M$. This fact actually troubled me quite a bit at first, but I have since attributed it more to human nature and my being disgusted that I ever had to go through that inconvenience in the first place. The reason I figure that is that I can go weeks or even months without ever turning on any game console. It all depends on whether I have something more interesting to do or not.

My music, however, is a slightly different situation. Some of what I listen to, I can simply get a few good old rednecks like myself together with some fiddles, a bass, washboard, and mouth flute together and we can all bust out some of that backwoods mountain music... with or without electronic gadgetry and with or without electricity, for that matter. Unfortunately, the other half of what I listen to is pretty reliant on electricity and electronics (I'm a metal head). I've wondered alot lately just how huge of an impact truly going off the grid would have on me in that regard. If I go more than a few days without agressive music blaring through a set of ear buds, I start to get irritable. I have the knowledge and the equipment to survive in the high country away from all modern conveniences for years, but I don't have an easy solution to my musical addiction.