Before Using The Player

Turning on the player for the first time, I was greeted with the Creative logo and that familiar drop of water which the Creative has associated the Zen product line with. Like most pieces of hardware, the first thing I did was make my way to the options. Getting to the options was not as easy as I had hope though. The default medium sensitivity for the touch pad was too sensitive for my liking. After setting the sensitivity to low, the touch pad was much more manageable.

After listening to the complimentary sample tracks Creative supplied with the player (which weren’t bad), I decided to hook up the player to my PC.

My essential system specifications which included:

Microsoft Windows XP SP2
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 3.0E
1024 MB of Corsair PC3200
400 GB Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA HDDs in RAID 0

Before doing any installation of software or transferring of songs, it is highly recommended that you search for the latest firmware available. The firmware which came with the player was version 1.01.03 (Latest official firmware as of December 14th, 2004). I decided to use the latest beta 2.10.05 firmware which supported Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) amongst other fixes.

Microsoft’s MTP, which is only supported by Windows XP, enables the player to be recognized by Windows Media Player 10. With this recognition, you can manipulate the song list and transfer songs onto the Zen Micro without the use of any Creative software or drivers. This is especially handy if you were at a friend’s house and wanted transfer some legitimate songs onto your Zen Micro.

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