Zune is bad. Spread the word

My Zune player keeps rebooting all the time. The battery is full. Bad software. Bad hardware. Don't buy Zune.

Version 3.1 (50)
Bootloader 435

(the latest)

Hallelujah! My Drive is Driving!

Hallelujah! My Drive is Driving!

I was fighting the good fight against my new Western Digital SATA drive and my P4S8X motherboard. I had FastTrack - the BIOS "controller" - recognizing and mounting the RAID array correctly. But I couldn't get Windows XP nor Windows Vista later to recognize the bloody drive. The P4S8X CD did not have a RAID driver for me. Yes, I had to format a 1.44 floppy and put the Western Digital DOS utility in it to try to diagnose the problem and see if anything would recognize the mysterious drive. I was beginning to suspect my motherboard SATA controller was no good. Or that because the drive was SATA II that it wasn't really backwards compatible with the SATA 150 motherboard controller. In any case, the Western Digital DOS utility found the drive and "formatted" it. But the Western Digital utility for Windows did not recognize the drive in Windows XP. I then installed Windows Vista, and it wouldn't recognize the drive either. I noticed that the RAID controller had a yellow question mark in device management (in either XP and Vista). I went on to find a driver. After months, I found the FastTrack thing, that is, the Promise FastTrack RAID driver for Windows 2000/XP (good enough for Vista). I downloaded the RAID driver, put it on an USB stick, and had Windows to rescan the hardware. Lo and behold: a miracle happened! Windows recognized my drive, installed the software (RAID controller), and offered to format it! After rebooting 3 times, it worked! (Compared to months and innumerable reboots before it).

My rating:

Western Digital HW/SW: 3 stars out of 5. Good hard drive, but bad documentation, and bad software. Wake up! Where are your Vista drivers?

Promise HW/SW: 5 stars out of 5.

Windows Vista: 3 stars of 5. It couldn't tell me where to find the software.

User: 1 star out of 5. It took me forever to get this s* working.

Cracked display, FutureShop's warranty

This is my father's Acer notebook. We bought it at FUTURESHOP here in Ottawa. As you can see it has a cracked display. We bought the 'extra-super-duper-extended-valid-all-over-the-world' warranty, so that if it broke in Brazil my father could fix it there under the warranty. The display cracked alone, likely wiggling in the passenger's seat of my father's car. 100% sure it didn't fall. I managed to bring the notebook to Canada to get it fixed. But the warranty didn't cover it. That's right, it was considered 'abuse', even though I explained it wasn't abuse, that it happened all of a sudden with normal use. It's in the fine print. I get angry because it's not abuse but they use the word anyways. Why not call it accident? They would charge me $400 to get it fixed (and a new notebook was $499). I now use it anyways with the cracked display. I may get a flat panel monitor one day to use with it.
Conclusion: 1- I'll never buy extra warranties at FutureShop because they are bad. 2-Notebook displays crack easily.

Moen shower faucet: broken for the 3rd time

These are photographs of my broken shower tap here at home by Moen. It was the 3rd model to break in 5 years. The parts are not carried anymore by Moen. Staff at Moen had pity on me and sent me the parts by mail the previous 2 times. I don't know what the designer was thinking when he/she created the part. The rounded shape of the inside provides bad traction to the tap. It always broke the same way. And the rounded shape of the faucet provided a bad grip to close the water it also. It's one of the worst product designs I've seen.





If I were to create a shower tap, I would try to provide the easiest grip possible. I would create something like this: