All right, it is downloaded and I have many songs that I downloaded from Kazaa. When I go to play them, I get a pop up saying "The owner of the protected content you are trying to access requires you to first upgrade some of the MS digital rights management (DRM) components on your computer. DETAILS When you click OK, a unique identifier and a DRM security file are sent to a MS server on the internet. The file is replaced with a customized version that contains your unique identifier. This increases the level of protection provided by DRM." Then I click OK and I get this: "The security upgrade cannot be performed because the server is not available. Try again later." I have tried this over and over, same result since last night. Any ideas?

VLC used to hiccup at the start of every FLAC file I played. In both the Linux version and the Windows version on different machines. Several updates and it eventually got fixed but until then I used Media Player Classic. http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ Or just for audio, Foobar: http://www.foobar2000.org/ Windows Media Player pretended not to even know the FLAC codec existed so I never had use for it. VLC amazed me by playing RAR'd up DVD(VOB) movies before they even finished downloading. Public Domain movies of course. The only thing you may want to watch if you install VLC is that they may try to slip in some useless(to me) toolbar, change your search engine or whatever. Just uncheck the box unless you want it. Actually, I had forgotten MPC until I started writing this so I installed it. To its credit, it didn't try to slip anything else into the install, which I like.

Use your head with this - a PC isn't a CD player, it's even better. Put any and all your CDs into the PC just once, rip them (transcribe the music files into computer files), and then play them an infinite number of times using the sound files stored on your hard drive. Either WMP or Itunes will do the rip. If the CD can be read from one PC and not the other, rip the CD on the working PC and then move the files to the other. Or, rip all the working files on the "bad" PC, and use the working PC to rip and transfer just the one non-working file. A concept that's hard for some to grasp - if you're trying to do something and it doesn't work, it's unlikely the solution is to do the same thing over and over again. Instead, try something different.

I don't use one myself but my 48 year old daughter has one she loves. It's the 2GB model and she seems real happy with all aspects of it. Of course, to get the maximum number of songs they advertise the music has to be reduced to a 64Kbs file. I don't know how that affects the quality, but with the ear buds provided I doubt you could tell much difference. The provided software is easily installed and easy to use. It allows you to rip and convert your CD's and transfer them to the Zen without much effort. For the money I doubt you would be dissapointed.