I have been allured by the Creative ZenMicro for its relative high-finite sound quality and cost efficiency, last but not the least, the free PlayForSure DRM WMA service provided by Arlington County library. Eventually, I got a refurbished white Creative ZenMicro.

It works as a charm with Amarok in my Gentoo Linux, you even don’t bother to rebuild the kernel since libnjb works in the user land. Still two things bother me: the Chinese Id3v2 tag support and MTP support. After checking their web site, I start the nightmare to upgrade the firmware.

According to their knowledge base, the firmware upgrade utility only works on Windows XP with SP1 and explicitly Windows Media Player 10. What the hell of this? Does Creative Lab have a special promotion for Windows XP sale? Unfortunately, I have one Windows Vista Business and one Windows 2000 Professional. I downloaded almost 100M software and install them in my two Windows platform, failed, fair enough. I just wondered how the Windows user could stand such a bloated software just for music transfer.

Thanks for my roommate, he has one Windows XP Home, one Windows XP Professional as the playgrounds. Unfortunately, the firmware upgrade still failed without any error message, the application just hang there, no response. I eventually call the Creative Labs. The reception felt sorry about my situation, and offered me to replace the device if I would like to pay the shipping, round trip, via either FedEx or UPS. And she was so kind to remind me I should do this ASAP in the one month’s warranty.

What a crappy company!

UPDATE: Creative refund the full price with tax at the end since Creative ZenMicro is out of stock.