Jeebus, another whiner community

Bought a SanDisk e280 Sansa 8GB MP3 player at Costco today. (No, I am not an iPod kind of guy and I don’t need 80 fucking gigabites of music in my pocket. Just to get that over with.) The price was right ($89.95 with the $20 off coupon) and my old 1GB Moto was giving me fits. And this player is very cool.
So I got it home and plugged it in according to the instructions, the drivers started to load, and then one driver failed to install properly. At that point the device wasn’t recognized by Windows. Hmm. No CD with drivers or anything, so I went online to the SanDisk e200-series forum to see how others were dealing with this.
What a bunch of pissers and moaners. Loads of people saying “I bought this POS at Costco, it’s a v2 model so it doesn’t have an option to switch USB from MTP to MSC mode (or vice versa), can’t update the firmware with the SanDisk firmware updater, crippled device, Windows doesn’t see it, wah wah wah taking it back because I’m too stupid to figure this out for myself.”
Then one guy actually very calmly notes, “Open the device manager with the device plugged in, and see if you see the device listed with a red ‘I got problems’ icon. If so, open up the property sheet and uninstall the drivers, then unplug and replug the device and the drivers will reinstall.” (I didn’t even have to do that — I just clicked the “update drivers” button and it reinstalled them without any problem.)
Now I will be the first to state that it ought to be easier to find the solution to this problem, since so many people seem to have it. And I really wonder how many people didn’t even get to the forum to find the answer and just boxed it up and returned it. But at the same time, if you persevere and don’t let yourself get pissed off, generally these problems can be solved, even if you ARE running Windows.
And for the guy who pissed and moaned because he didn’t have a Windows PC but expected it to work anyway — dumbass, it says right on the box that minimum requirements include, duh, Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10.
On the other hand, why am I upset about all this? These are the same people I listen to every damn day at work.
Sigh.
Oh, and the player is definitely NOT a POS. It’s very, very nice, and it’s working very, very well.
UPDATE: Refreshingly, a guy who not only writes a good review, but who has been using his e280 actively for over a year without a problem. Well, one problem, but it was self-inflicted: “DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT defrag your Sansa!”
Note that his even his complaints about non-existent chargers and extra cables no longer apply; these items are readily available, or at least the Sansa website says they are.