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I purchased a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 60GB MP3 player approximately this time last year. I've really been pleased with it. It delivered 60GB of capacity (enough for a good chunk of my music collection, at least all the stuff I cared about), great sound, excellent battery life (I've never run it out), decent ease of use, and great value ($255 for a 60GB player beats anything Apple's offering in the iPod line).
Since I subscribe to Real's Rhapsody music service, and it offers the option to download tracks to "PlaysForSure" music players, I was pleased when Creative offered a firmware upgrade to the player that enabled the PlaysForSure capability on my Zen Xtra. I downloaded the update and tried to install it. I got an error, so I rebooted the player and the computer and tried again. This time the update seemed to be installing fine, until it got to a point where it said it needed to reboot the player. The player's screen went dead, and that was it. It never came to life ever again.
I searched the Creative knowledgebase online but none of the solutions there quite fit my situation. I emailed them to open a problem ticket. I got some suggestions to try, none of which worked. The technician sent me an RMA request form. I filled it in and sent it back. They gave me an RMA. Took about a week to get it boxed up and shipped back to them, which was the week of Christmas so shipping was a pain and slow. Creative's repair facility, according to the US Postal Service, got the player on December 27. Their online RMA status page didn't show receipt of the player for a few days after that. Late last week, it showed that they had tested the player and couldn't power it up.
Today, they updated the information with an indication that they shipped a replacement player (different serial number) to me by UPS. Given typical UPS shipping times, I don't expect to see it before Monday or Tuesday. 
Overall, I was impressed with how this whole thing went. They didn't make me call anyone and sit on hold for hours. They worked with me by email and offered usable, intelligent suggestions. The RMA request was processed very quickly (though it asked the same information I had pretty much already provided in the problem report, which was a tiny bit annoying). The player arrived in their hands on December 27 and they shipped it back on January 18. They quote 10-15 business days for turnaround on their web site. Assuming their holidays compare to my employer's, Dec. 27 wasn't a business day, Dec. 28 also wasn't, but the 29th through the 13th were, plus today. That works out to 13 days. Even if you count the two days in December and MLK Jr. Day, that's still 16 days, which is quite reasonable.
The cost? The player was still under its 1 year hardware warranty but not labor warranty. I had to pay them $24.95 to diagnose and test the player, plus around $5.00 to ship it. Compare this to Apple's $59 or $99 repair fees for their (already overpriced) iPod player. Even the third parties doing iPod repair aren't as cheap as creative. iPodResQ charges $29 for the initial estimate and return shipping.
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