Thursday, January 01, 2009

No Hootenanny for Zunes


As the celebrations took place, corks popped, fireworks exploded, music rocked and people sang 'Auld Land Syne' the Zune machine quietly died in its cradle.

One would think that after the Millennium bug everyone would have thought about dates and time and avoided any sort of repeat but it appears that Microsoft didn’t learn. Around midnight Pacific time last night, 30GB Zune models began restarting and locking up at their boot screens. Apparently the problem occurred irrespective of whether the Zune was idle or playing music but only affected the 30GB model.

Microsoft has issued its official statement ‘there appears to be a bug in the 30GB Zune's internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. Microsoft recommends allowing affected Zunes to run down their batteries, and come noon GMT on January 1, 2009, it will be safe to plug in, restart, and once again rock out with the Zune.’

We think that this is the sort of bad publicity the Microsoft don’t want and rather than ‘rocking out with the Zune’ it just makes the Apple family stronger.

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