Zune
The other day, my Zune refused to pause the music. The icon in the lower right would toggle between Play and Pause, but the music kept playing. Holding the Pause button for about a second would cause the Zune to go to sleep, but upon waking up (pressing Pause again), the symptom persisted.
I needed to reboot my Zune, but didn't know how.
The solution is to hold the "Back" button and "Up" at the same time for about a second. The screen will blank, and then the device will reboot. Problem solved.
My discovery source: http://www.cliczune.com/2006/12/zune_tricks_reb.html
I use Windows 2008 Server as a workstation. I find that certain things actually work better (like Sleep Mode, for instance, which is weird because servers shouldn't need to sleep, but Vista would often not go to sleep and drain my battery the entire couple of hours that it continued to run in my computer bag, and Windows Server 2008 has never done that.... but I digress).
However, when the new Zune 3.0 software was released today, I found, like many others, that the software explicitly listed three operating systems that were supported, and Server 2008 was unfortunately not one of...
Thank God! The new Zune separates podcasts from music. Not that I don't love listening to Carl Franklin or Scott Hanselman talk for hours on end, but when I play my entire music collection on shuffle mode, I don't really want to hear a talk show.
Since I kept scores of DNRs and Hanselminutes on my Zune, I found myself needing to skip tracks all of the time before now... That manual interaction proved to be quite the distraction when all I was trying to do is concentrate on a programming task.
The Problem
The new Zune firmware is out! Yay!
The Zune software still uses BITS as the only means to download the firmware. Boo!
BITS doesn't like being behind a HTTP proxy server that requires authentication. In my particular situation, I must authenticate against a Microsoft ISA Server using Integrated Security (i.e., NTLM authentication) before my machine is permitted to receive files from a remote webserver.
But, by default, BITS doesn't automatically provide your domain user information to the proxy server. So, when the Zune software attempted to use BITS to download the firmware, it failed, and I only got a "C00D11CD" error...