I upgraded to 2.0b3 last night. Everything seemed to go fine, and it appeared to be working properly on my desk plugged into the AC. This morning, I went on a trip and plugged it back into the car for the first time since upgrading. I saw the animated logo, saw the initial booting info screen, and saw it go to the standard playing screen. However, immediately after going to this screen, the screen went blank. I could hear it accessing the hard drive and the antenna was still up. I played around with it for a while and noticed that if I turned it off by holding the up button, the antenna went down, and I could get it to come back up, but nothing appeared on the screen and nothing was coming from the speakers. I tried blindly adjusting the volume, but that didn't seem to help. I wanted to take it back inside and downgrade, but I was late for a trip to visit some relatives a few cities over for lunch (the first highway trip I've had in a while, of course), so I had to listen to road noise instead of music for about an hour.

As I was leaving after lunch, I played with the empeg a little more, with no more success than before. So I left the parking lot intending to downgrade as soon as I got home. But before I even got back on the highway, probably less than 5 minutes after starting the car back up, I looked down and noticed that the screen was displaying stuff again. I think that it was showing an ``I've got no playlist queued'' type screen. So I played some stuff, and after turning the volume up, which was, oddly, all the way down, it worked fine for the rest of the trip.

So it seems to be working now, but I'm concerned that it didn't work before. I may have turned it off before the first leg of my trip, so that may explain the initial hour-long downtime, but I did stare at it for, it seems, minutes at a time trying to figure out how to make it work. Any ideas?

It's possible that you simply got hit by one of the known bugs in 2.0b3.

If it's still working for you, great, keep on using it. If it fails on you again, try downgrading to 1.03 and see if everything returns to normal. If so, leave it on 1.03 until the next 2.0 beta is out where many of the bugs will be fixed.

I hadn't seen near-total unresponsiveness as a bug. Sorry. But now, while synchronizing some new uploads, the first under 2.0b3, my hard drive (the original) is making nice whining noises. Wonderful. It wasn't making these noises until I started the sync, and I didn't drop it or anything. I wonder if there's any relation there. [sigh]

PS: Is there any way to use angle brackets in this BBS? < shows up as < and entering actual brackets hides the enclosed text, I guess, as an unknown HTML tag.

I have noticed that when you first install 2.0b3 the dimmer value is set to 0. Is it possible that with bright daylight you couldn't read the display. The first time it happened to me it was late at night and I could barely read the display. Winding up the dimmer fixed this.

Peter

I appreciate the idea, but that wasn't it. There really was no display at all, because I could see it while it booted. Besides, I looked pretty closely. I wasn't actually driving while I was fiddling with it initially.

The reason I mentioned it (and I should have added this in my post) was that in my case the start up animation and "loading modules" bit was done at MAX BRIGHT and then it switched to using the dimmer settings (MIN). Confused the hell out me - it looked like a faulty display, only a few moments ago it was nice and bright. Then I remembered the dimmer...........

It seems (and i'n not sure if 1.0 had this feature) that there are seperate dimmer settings for both headlight on and headlight off. Both default to 0 on install.

PK

You are correct in stating that the dimmer settings do not take effect until the player is started. First it will boot at full brightness. Then the dimmer setting will kick in when the player is launched.

Also, I don't think the "dimmer settings getting clobbered by the upgrade" problem happened to everyone. In fact, which user settings were getting clobbered seemed to be somewhat random. Some people it was the EQs, some it was the loudness, etc.

You know..... Theres a joke about a bunch of sad bast***ds logged on to a BBS at 10pm on a friday night.........

PK