Dave Naffziger's Blog

Iva recently received an 80 GB Zune as a token of appreciation for her work on a project. The first thing that I did once she unpacked it was to plug it into the computer (running Vista). The setup process that greeted me was horrific. The experience was so bad, that I presumed I had gotten into some error state. This weekend, I duplicated the process on my own laptop (running Vista). Here are the screenshots (note, I have UAC turned off so it could easily have been worse).

After a decent amount of installing, I presumed that the Zune was installed. Instead I got this message.

There was no disc in the box.

Two error messages this time.

A roughly 30 MB download…

The process that started everything was when I plugged the Zune into the computer. Fortunately I caught the warning that I need to unplug the Zune. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t unplugged it.

I can’t imagine that anyone at Microsoft is happy about this process. I’m assuming that it is the result of either a real or perceived threat of a monopoly lawsuit.

I’d be incredibly cautious if I were Google. Similar encumbrances would be disastrous.