Going Wireless - Part II

Well that was simple enough. After all my previous travails trying to setup a wireless network (Going Wireless - Part I) the solution turned out to be quite simple. I lost my internet connection when I connected my router so when I looked at the next installation step and saw "open browser and type http://xxx.xxx.x.x" I couldn't understand how to do that - how can I open a webpage without an internet connection?

Oops. Turns out that while you do use a browser and you do type in a 'typical' url you're not in fact opening a webpage, instead you're accessing the router directly. Once I'd realized my erroneous assumption setting up my router went smoothly; as a test I was able to sync my Zune 80 wirelessly.

Nevertheless, this still doesn't explain why my mouse and keyboard were being disabled during my earlier attempts. Strange.

Online shopping and e-mail

I shop online fairly frequently and there have been several notable occasions where during check-out my credit card information was rejected. In each of these cases neither the credit card company nor vendor could tell me why my transactions weren’t going through – so I moved on without purchasing anything.

The first time I remember this happening to me was when I was trying to order a Microsoft Zune Original (I’m actually relieved I never ordered one). To make the story short, Microsoft check-out refused my credit card information despite my credit card company saying they had approved it. Go figure.

The second time was with Gamestop / EB Games. I first phoned EB Games Customer Service and was told that I should contact my credit card company. Okay, fine – I wasn’t surprised as this so far matched my previous experience. What was different this time, however, is that my credit card company informed me they had no record of a transaction request. Eh? How could my credit card be rejected if my credit card company didn’t know I was buying something?

So I called back EB Games where I spoke to a different, much more helpful and informative Customer Service agent. He verified that my credit card information was correct and then dug a little deeper into my situation. It turned out that EB Games (and I assume other vendors must do, as well) sets up various ‘flags’ and if enough of these are triggered then the transaction is denied even if the billing/shipping information is correct. In my case the main ‘flag’ holding me up was that I was using an e-mail with a ‘.ca’ address while my billing information was in the USA. Interesting.

I set up a new account with a ‘.com’ e-mail and my online order went through without any problems.

Different vendors must set up different flags as the vast majority of the time I don’t have this problem. Anywhoo, now I wonder whether this was the cause of the problem I had when trying to order a Zune Original. Curious.

Welcome back, Zune

In a previous post I described how I had to return my Zune 80 and wondered whether or not I should get another one (Bye bye, Zune). Well, I ended up purchasing another Zune 80 the day after I returned the first one. This rushed decision was forced upon me because I was leaving town within a couple days, and if I was going to buy one it made no point to wait until after my trip.

Anywhoo, I'm relieved to say my new Zune 80 has worked without problems and I'm very satisfied with it. I used it to listen to music and watch videos - time spent on the plane and in the airport passed quickly, which was a major reason for me wanting a portable media player to begin with.

The new AC adapter / charger seems to work fine with no overheating after a few hours. I still haven't bought a new dock though. It would be convenient but I don't want to push my luck.

Bye bye, Zune

I just came back from returning my Zune 80. Ugh. The return process was easy enough since I still had my receipt. I told the salesman about the buggy software and that I couldn't delete stuff off the Zune, but I forgot to mention that I suspect that was due to the fact the Zune battery could no longer hold a charge. I almost went back to tell him but... it's only a guess. They have techs to figure out that stuff, right? It's not like they'll resell it as a used item without checking it out. They need to clean out all my files, anyway.

Anywhoo, right now I'm not sure what I want to do. Try buying another Zune? Something else? Buy nothing? Aaargh. Decisions, decisions, and I only have 3 days to decide.

Woot - a disappointing experience

Earlier this month I posted about an online store with great bargains, called Woot where I ordered an Altec Lansing m604 Zune speaker dock at half the price it was sold for elsewhere.

I ordered it on the 5th December. Woot took my money on the 5th December. Woot sent me an e-mail on 7th December telling me my item had shipped and provided me with a tracking number, estimated delivery on 12th December.

Well, yesterday was the 12th so I phone Fedex. To my surprise Fedex tells me they never received the actual package for shipping!?

Woot has no phone number listed on their website, but ask customers to go to the forums for answers, or contact Woot via e-mail. So I e-mail and then head to the forums, where after going through more posts than I can count I discover that Woot did not actually have enough units in stock to fulfill all of the orders. What the --?

On their website Woot says they do not sell stuff they don't have in stock. So what's up with that? Anywhoo, from what I could gather from the forums, Woot was blaming the delay in shipping due to inclement weather - the additional units they were expecting hadn't yet arrived.

Finally, this afternoon I receive an e-mail from Woot basically confirming what I garnered in the forums, and that my order would be shipping tomorrow or Saturday. But if I need to receive my order before 19th December then I could cancel my order.

Okey dokey, then. I canceled my order.

My major issues with Woot are these:

1. Woot says they don't sell more than they have in stock. In my case this was clearly false.
2. Woot took my money despite not having the m604 in stock, and here's the kicker, Woot e-mailed to tell me my non-existent purchase had shipped.
3. Woot waited 7-days before informing me that there was a delay in shipping.

Anywhoo, I wouldn't be nearly so irritated if Woot had better communication. eg. tell me an item is out of stock and / or backordered before I commit to the purchase and don't charge me until my order is shipped.

To be fair, I admit that if I were home to receive my delivery I would not have canceled my order, but Fedex will only hold a package a maximum of five days.

Overall, an extremely disappointing experience.

Holiday return policies

I recently discovered that Circuit City has a holiday return policy currently in effect. Items purchased from mid-November can be returned up to early or late January 2008, depending on the item.

Hypothetically, I could return my Zune 80, get a refund, and order a Zune 80 Original.

Hmmm... this merits additional thought.

Woot

I’d never heard of Woot.com before this morning, but once I read that they had a one-day "until supplies last" sale for the Altec Lansing m604 I headed over there ASAP. The m604 is a speaker dock for Microsoft Zunes and when it was originally released (a year ago?) it was priced at $200. Currently you can buy one for $100.

Today, Woot is selling the Altec Lansing m604 for $39.99 + $5 shipping! Wow! Once I heard that I did some rapid, intense research into whether my Zune 80 will fit the m604 charging dock. Given that this model was released well before the Zune 80, and given what I remembered from skimming some forum threads, the Zune 80 compatibility issue was hazy.

Zune.net says the m604 is compatible with all Zunes, but some posts say that in fact the Zune 80 does not fit. Anywhoo, to cut a multitude of forums and threads short, the answer is ‘yes’ (knock-on-wood), though I won’t be 100% confident until I try it for myself. Still for $44.99 I’m willing to take the minor risk. If all else fails, I can always sell it on e-bay for a small profit. :o)

From what I gather Woot.com sells only a single product per 24 h, at a reduced price and as supplies last, and sells a different product each day. Woot.com doesn’t pre-advertise what product will be on the block or how many units they have. If an item is sold-out, the next product nevertheless won’t be announced / available until midnight.

I might have to start paying attention. :o)

Video converters

I didn’t realize how much music my 80 GB Zune can hold until after loading my entire music collection and found it only uses 7 GB. Upon this pleasant discovery I decided to load some videos. Videos, however, are taking me a little more work. Nothing earth-shattering, it’s just that the videos I’d like to load are not wmv or mpeg-4. This set me up on a quest for a free video converter. After trying several different programs I settled on one called “Prism” that I downloaded from CNET.

Prism can convert mkv, avi, mov, ogm (and more) to wmv or mp4 video formats. The interface is easy to understand and so far the conversion has been satisfactory – though understandably it depends a lot on the quality of the source file. One caveat. Some of my videos originally with a 4:3 aspect ratio are slightly squished horizontally after conversion to mp4. I don't expect perfection on such a tiny little screen so it doesn't bother me much. I've also noticed that in a couple of my videos the voices are too quiet relative to the music / sound-effect volumes. I don't know if tweaking Prism options would alleviate this -- frankly I can't be bothered.

Anywhoo, I don't know if there are better free and unrestricted video converters out there - so unless one jumps into my lap for now I'm sticking with Prism since it does what I want it to do.

Zune 80 update

As an update to my previous post about the new Microsoft Zune 80, I was able to subscribe to podcasts without going through the Zune Marketplace. All I needed to do was copy and paste the podcast / RSS link into the PC Zune software that came with my Zune 80. Once I did that the software downloaded the podcasts automatically onto my computer and then synced with the Zune 80 the next time they were connected. I subscribed to podcasts from cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, and cbc.ca.

I also tested my Zune 80 battery life. I was able to play approximately 175 minutes of video before the charge ran out. That works out to 2.9 hours. According to CNET, Microsoft rates the battery at 4 hours for video (with Wi-Fi turned off). Ugh.

I'm fairly certain my Zune was fully charged (at least, I was certain before my testing) so I wonder why I'm getting 25% less than advertised. Anywhoo, next step is to check my audio life, which Microsoft rates at 30 hours.

Zune 80

I recently purchased a Microsoft Zune 80, primarily for use on trips and such and with the idea of buying a speaker dock or plugging it into my stereo at home. Overall I’m very satisfied with it. It comes with ‘premium’ ear buds and a USB cable. Besides music, video, podcasts, and pictures, the Zune 80 has a RBDS-enabled FM radio and wireless-sync capability.

The music sounds good (AA3, wma, protected-wma, wma-lossless, mp3) and the video (wmv, mpeg-4, h.264) displays nicely for its size (320 x 240 resolution; 3.2 inch diagonal screen). It can only show pictures in jpeg. The software for syncing the Zune 80 to my PC installed quickly with no problems and so far has worked perfectly on Vista. Both the PC Zune software and Zune have a very easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

The PC Zune software, in addition to managing / syncing my music, videos, and pictures, looks like an alternative to Windows Media Player -- capable of ripping and burning CDs. One definite annoyance I've discovered is that if I delete any files from my "collection" in the PC software, then the next time I sync the same files will be deleted on my Zune. So far I haven't found a way - if there is one - to deactivate this stupid, inane function. If I want to remove files from my Zune I'd prefer to do it manually.

I have no immediate plans to sign up to Zune Marketplace but it's a similar concept to Apple's iTunes store. I haven't tried subscribing to any podcasts, but according to the Zune official site it's not necessary to get podcasts through the Marketplace.

I have my eye on several Zune 80 accessories but the selection is limited right now -- I'm going to wait a little bit before forking over even more money.

Zune quest

Recently I decided I wanted a large-capacity portable music player with video capability. After deciding on my criteria and doing some research I settled on the Zune 80. It’s only a coincidence that I made my decision a week after it was released – the Zune hadn’t even been on my radar since I’d only heard negative things about the first generation Zune.

The first sign of trouble came when I went online looking at major retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Walmart…). None of them had Zune 80s in stock; they were either unavailable or backordered. No problem, right? The Zune 80s had just been released; of course demand was high and I wasn’t in desperate need of one. I could wait. There were two problems with that. First, I had a nice discount coupon at Best Buy and there was an online sale at Circuit City – unfortunately both expired that weekend. Second, I was worried the Zune 80 would go the way of the Nintendo Wii. It’s approaching Christmas and a salesman told me Zune 80’s scarcity was due to production problems. Ouch.

On Saturday I drove to multiple locations of Best Buy and Circuit City but none proved their online information wrong – none in stock. Eventually I decided to take advantage of Circuit City’s online sale regardless of how long I ended up waiting for the backorder. Then something unexpected happened. Circuit City’s website has an item-locator function where you can see which stores have a particular item in stock. I’d used this feature previously in my quest for the Zune 80 and came up empty. However, as I went through checkout I discovered that the Zune 80 could not be shipped. In store pick-up was my only option – at a location 50 miles away that didn’t appear in my initial search. Eh?

This is what confuses me. The item locator feature came up with 7 – 10 Circuit City locations based on my zip code – none of which had the Zune 80 in stock. However, when I placed an order, Circuit City now tells me that not only will they *not* ship it to me, but that I have to pick it up myself at a location too far away to show up on their item locator! What the --

Portable media players

I’ve always viewed the growth of the portable music player market – and Apple’s dominance – with an amazed but largely uninvolved eye. My impression of Apple is that its products are well designed but expensive, and stuffed with so much proprietary content and limitations that I avoid it like the plague despite my almost equal dislike of Microsoft (better the devil I know than the one I don’t).

My own foray into this arena was purchasing a simple 1GB Creative mp3 player a few years ago. This particular mp3 player met all my criteria. First, the player is small enough to use in the gym. Second, it plays mp3s. Third, it doesn’t require the installation of anything on my computer. Fourth and last, it uses batteries I can easily purchase and replace myself.

The Creative mp3 player has worked great for what I want it to do. I still have it and it still works but… recently the yen for something more, with more memory and video capability has begun to appeal to me. Recently I was on a business trip and during my free time I was often quite bored. I’d been to that particular city before – I had no desire to do touristy things or have to lug purchases on the plane that I could just as easily buy back home. The idea of a portable player that can carry my entire music collection and play videos (no matter how tiny the screen) has appeal.

So with changing needs by necessity my criteria have also changed. As larger-capacity players I considered use integrated batteries, I crossed my fingers and gave up on replaceable ones. I also don’t need one to use it in the gym; I have my old one for that. A new criterion is that it plays both common music and video formats.

My original third criterion was based in part on worries about software compatibility, computer resource issues and security. A new computer (I'm connected) and some research alleviated my concerns.

I’ve been told some people running iTunes on Windows Vista have had problems with their computers locking up. That crossed off iPods were I so inclined. I’ve had too much trouble with 3rd party ‘Vista-certified’ software (Vista-certified, are you sure?) to even consider the risk of running an Apple product on a Windows O/S. Heck, forget 3rd party software. I had more than enough trouble just trying to get Vista and Microsoft software running properly (Windows Vista; Computer Woes).

So where does that leave me? My first stop whenever I want to see what’s out there is CNET. There I learned that Microsoft had recently released the second iteration of the Zune – the first of which I had only heard negative things about. Anywhoo, the 2nd generation Zune, the Zune 80, here and elsewhere had mostly positive reviews.

So there we go: my quest for the Zune 80.