**Enigma, I don’t see how you being a Sandisk/Sansa “Apologist” helps us Users when we are forced to resort to coming to a User’s Forum, after finding SanDisk to be useless and no help. It is never OK to produce junk, no matter how little it costs, but particularly when it’s from an industry-leading memory manufacturer like SanDisk.
Where do you get the “$30” figure for an M250, and, besides that, where do you get the idea that it’s perfectly OK to produce a product that should just be thrown away when it dies, based on some spreadsheet-jockey’s “Cost/Benefit Analysis” that only figures in the benefit to the manufacturer, and disregards their consumers?
How old are you? Probably young enough to think it’s OK to fill our landfills with poorly designed electronics that leech toxic chemicals into our water-supplies, again based on a cost/benefit analysis done by SanDisk, on whether it’s “worth it” to them to bother supporting their consumers. (Reminds me of the Ford Pinto scandal…lucky for us our Sansa’s can’t blow up!)
I’m glad I came here first, and have been reading through the posts, BEFORE I decided on risking my money on SanDisk Sansa’s. I was all set to buy an M250 2 gig model until I read these posts that document there is no resurrecting a dead one.
At least SanDisk is now bothering to provide the Recovery Tool utility for use with reviving their new models, so maybe SanDisk is finally coming up to speed on supporting their users, and not filling our landfills with irrepairable junk that not only enrages and rips off their customers, but gravely damages SanDisk’s reputation as well.
For you frustrated M-series owners of dead units, …at the risk of me sounding like an apologist too…I’d like to mention that even hugely successful devices like Blackberries have had their “self-destruct” models too. Our Fortune100 corporation has been using Blackberries since the beginning, and since I spent 10 years in our I.T. department, I dealt with the problems personally. The early ones were programmed using the C++ development language, and were generally solid as a rock for years. But then Blackberry moved to their newer models being programmed using Java, at which point we saw immediate problems, just like these MP3 players are exhibiting, …of units that worked fine one day, but are locked up and dead the next, for no user-caused reason at all.
Fortunately, Blackberry also provided a Recovery Tool that we in the I.T. department would use to revive these dead ones, as SanDisk is now doing with their new models, and, thankfully, that Recovery tool worked every time for us. I can only guess that there is some internal chip-limitation in the older Sansa models such as the M-series, that does not lend them to being software-recoverable.**
I hope the new model’s Recover Tool is as successful as the Blackberry’s was, because plenty of owners of the new models are having the same problems as you M-owners.
So, yes, it’s a “Live and Learn” engineering and programming scenario, but Enigma, it’s not OK to just blow off the customer with a “Too bad, just throw it away, you only paid $xx.xx for it, so what do you expect” attitude. It might be something a disreputable Chinese generic could get away with, but not SanDisk.
Message Edited by Stenn on 01-15-2008 03:48 PM
Message Edited by Stenn on 01-15-2008 04:03 PM
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