My youngest son got some money and a gift card for Christmas, and together with the money he has been saving, he used it to get himself a new Microsoft Zune. I tried to talk him into getting an iPod, but he didn’t like it. Hmmf.

Anyway, he ended up doing okay, because he didn’t get the huge honkin’ Zune. Thank goodness.

Happy New Year from Microsoft Corp.: Your Zune is dead.

Thousands of Microsoft’s Zune media players — the software company’s answer to Apple Inc.’s iPod — unexpectedly conked out Wednesday and showed users an error message, prompting references to “Y2K for Zunes.” The problems appeared when people tried to start up their devices.

Frustrated users lit up Microsoft’s online support forum for Zunes with more than 2,500 messages by Wednesday afternoon.

Late Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the outage affected only the 30-gigabyte Zune models and was caused by a problem with their internal clock.

Comments are closed.