Well this has been a strange Review to say the least. At first i had done a quite lengthy Review of this player and gave it good marks but then i run into a problem….
Before i purchased this mp3 player for myself i did some checking on the net and noticed a few people who had purchased this player had problems with it locking up. These posts of people having this issue were several months old and i figured by now the manufacturer would have known about this and corrected the problem. Based on this i decided to purchase one of these audio players hoping that i wouldn’t see this lockup problem..
One day i was sitting here and the player shut it self off because the battery was low, I got a new battery for it and put that in and only to have the player get to the Sansa logo screen and not continue past it. I tried using several other batteries and the same result with each of them and that is the player was locking up at the logo screen.
This really annoyed me to no end because prior to this lockup crap i really did like the player it was perfect for what i needed, so i was bummed out when the thing basically refused to boot up properly. I even tried leaving the battery out of it for a day or so hoping that might reset the player but no go there its still locked up even after that.
I didn’t just give up on it when it did lockup i tried numerous times to contact SanDisk to see if they could tell me if there was something i could do to reset the player and i never got any response from them at all.
In conclusion this audio player is a waste of money, If it wasn’t for the lockup and rendering the device totally useless i would recommend it to every one. However since the device locks up and you can’t use it at all after the lockup i recommend people steer clear of this audio player till Sandisk rectifies it’s issues with this audio player. I will be taking my m250 back to the store and looking for a full refund…
Update December 11 2006..
After waiting several months and not hearing from Sandisk over the Sansa m250 lockup issue i gave up on them. I took my player back to the store and of course they would only exchange it for another unit of the same model.
After i got the new player i was shocked to one day get a e-mail from Sansa and the e-mail describes how to do a factory reset of the player. Here are the steps you must take to reset the player back to factory defaults. Do NOTE that this probably will erase all your songs so i hope you have them backed up.
Here are the steps on how to do a power reset.
- First take the battery out of the player.
- Hold the power button down with the battery out for 40 seconds.
- Then wait 5 minutes, and put a brand new battery into the player.
I’m waiting for my player to lock up again and then i will give this a try and see if it in fact resets the unit.
Update December 21 2006…
Well after getting some user responses about this reset not working i decided to try it myself on my new player which hadn’t locked up yet. I was amazed to see that the reset instruction that i received from Sandisk didn’t reset the player at all.
So i contacted Sandisk yet again and after a couple of messages back and forth , i learned that basically if your player does lock up and its still under warranty send it back to Sandisk and they will replace it. If your warranty has expired though then your out of luck and might as well toss the player in the garbage.
As i said before avoid buying this player.. Sandisk never used enough thought in making the player and there fore when it locks up the player is useless.
I hope Sandisk in the future makes a way so you can reset the player back to factory default if one should encounter a lockup.
WolfManz611..
