Zune falls, Zune cracks. :-(

Today something tragic happened.  I was walking down the hall, and as I took my Zune out of my pocket, I fumbled the device, and it fell flat on it’s face (screen) onto the hard floor.  The poor thing’s front glass cracked, and now it’s sad.

It seems to work fine otherwise, but obviously I want to get this thing fixed.  I called Zune customer support (1-877-GET-ZUNE) and got some irritating news.  I already knew that my Zune was out of warranty, but apparently the Zune team doesn’t provide a paid repair service for out-of-warranty devices.  All hope had seemed lost until I asked the guy if there were any third-party repair options.  The customer support representative told me to go to “triple W dot live dot com”.  I thought it was odd that he would refer me to Microsoft’s online services front, until he added “and search for ‘Zune repair centers’”.  I got the message and Goggled it instead.

It seems that I can buy the screen for $20 (plus $6 for tools) from rapidrepair.com.  While I think it is a bit unreasonable for Microsoft to not offer a pair repair service for their out-of-warranty products that are still in production, it will be cheaper and more fun to do the repair myself.  RapidRepair has a general tutorial for dissecting the Zune, and I’ll look around for a more specific tutorial.  Until then!

General, Rants
Customer Support, Microsoft, Rants, Repairs, Zune
24 February 2009 comments [2] TrackBack-URI

1. My Piece of the Inter(.)net » Zune Repair: Replacing a Flash Zune’s Glass posted on March 6, 2009:

   [...] time the problem wasn’t the storage.  Last week I broke my 8GB, second generation Microsoft Zune, but this time I could repair the thing [...]

2. Fixing my Zune’s broken glass (again) on the cheap! | My Piece of the Inter(.)net posted on May 23, 2009:

   [...] while ago I dropped my Zune flat on its face and fixed it myself with some parts from RapidRepair.com.  Unfortunately, it seems that Rapid [...]

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