I had a butt load of American Express points saved up so I thought I would spend them. I started looking around and finally settled on a Creative Zen “Sleek” device bundle. It comes with the 20GB player as well as a docking station and set of Intrigue 2200 speakers.
I am quite impressed… very cool.
Even more, it pushes you to use Media Player. I admit I don’t use media player for anything but playing things that pop it up. This forced me to start looking a little closer. Did you know you can RIP CDs with Windows Media Player? Not only that it figures out the albums and songs and artists, very cool. It even downloaded the cover of the CD which was quite a surprise to me. If you have your explorer in Thumbnail view I noticed there was even a folder.jpg to be used to throw that image on the folder for you.
I know people are like “HELLO MCFLY!” but you have to understand, I am a server guy, not a workstation guy. I have no less than 11 physical machines in my house with all but 4 running Server based OSes and in some cases running virtual machines with 12-15-20 copies of Windows Server running. Even one of my XP Pro machines has about 15 Windows Server Virtuals loaded on it. One of the 4 machines running XP is actually Media Center so I don’t even see that OS, just the Media Center display so I don’t even count that as an XP machine, in fact it probably should just go right into Media Center for the shell, not sure why MS doesn’t do that for dedicated Media Centers.
The machine I use the absolute most is a Dell laptop running Windows Server 2003. It sits on a kitchen table that sits in my master bedroom. Yes, that seems odd, but I like table space and my master bedroom is where I spend most time so have *a* kitchen table there (I have one in the kitchen too thanks) so I can do things on it. It is positioned so I can watch the TV that is also in the bedroom. A rear projection Mitsubishi.
So anyway, except for the weight of the Sleek, I am quite impressed.
I am thinking of getting an MP3 hard disk player, did your points allow you to choose whatever device you wanted or only their offerings? I am thinking of getting one, I like the Creative Zen series, everyone seems to be going Ipod crazy, I don’t want to jump on the Ipod bandwagon for the sake of it, but i’m curious what made you choose this model and whether there are any design flaws which you can see which you don’t like? thanks joe
I knew I wanted a Creative Zen of some sort. I actually have a little Creative Muvo device that was a gift from the MS MVP program and I knew I wanted something that would be compatible with that in terms of what software had to be loaded. I.E. I need one software package for both devices, not two.
At this point I can’t say I have any issues with it.