Zen Micros are defective.

Be wary of the Creative Zen Micro and it's claims of 10-12 hours of battery life. It has been discovered that the micros have a power hungry 'standby' mode that remains on for 24 hours after each shut down. Depending upon your listening habits you can expect as little as 4 hours total play time (as is the case with my recently purchased micro). Sure, 10-12 hours can be acheived with continuous playback, but you will not get close to that if you turn it off for hours in between listening. Creative seems to be unresponsive about addressing the issue too. Their latest firmware upgrade (1.02.05) does not help the issue, even though Creative claims it fixes the problem. See the links below for the full details.

Maybe THG could do a little article on this to help make the public aware that this product does not meet up with either Creative's advertising claims, or the THG review (http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041224/zen_micro-03.html).

http://forums.creative.com/creativ [...] ing&page=1

http://www.seiya-subtitles.net/ZenMicroPowerLoss.html

http://forums.creative.com/creativ [...] ing&page=1

Darn, and I was seriously considering a purchase. Oh well.

MSI 865PE Neo2-P mobo
Asus ASUS V9280S 128MB video
P4 2.66GHz (533 FSB)
PC2700 Kingston HyperX 512MB
Sparkle PSU 300W
80GB Western Digital HDD 7200rpm

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