At times I thought of giving up and got the newest 16GB Creative Zen style 100. It is so small, light weight (44g!), cheap price, and can run 15 hours (Creative claims a highly exaggerated 32 hours!) on the tiny battery with one charge. But…

If you compare it with the Dell DJ20 (or this old Creative OEM product) the sound quality has very obvious difference. The difference is so huge that even me, with a pair of wooden ears , can feel!!

What the hell those guys in Creative Lab are thinking and doing?

Your Dell DJ20 will go directly into the rescue mode. I assume you know you have to format the new “disk”, clear the old firmware, and then… you will get trapped by the infamous “recovery mode” – the hell. If you are like me the normal or unlucky one, under this hell the Dell DJ20 firmware upgrader application never can see your DJ20 and never can start transfering the firmware.

If you google it there are lots of different people telling you different ways of getting out of this hell. Some say you have to download a “fixup.zip” and run sth. inside. Some even say you have to uninstall all the USB system drivers!!

I have spent(or wasted) 5 hours following every of them but no, they all do not work!! Using a clean new PC does not work either.

At last, I found that uninstalling the WMP 11 and WMP 9 and installing the WMP 10 is the solution. No fixup.zip, no USB uninstall, no need a brand new PC. Of course, the pre-requisite is that you are running Windows XP.

Rudolf.

1. There is a 2000mAh battery available on eBay look for “CREATIVE ZEN TOUCH DAA-BA0004 DAP-HD0014″ which is plug-and-play on Dell DJ20, BUT WAIT…

2. Unfortunately the motherboard + HDD + new battery is barely possible to fit into this chassis. Since battery will inflate during charge up this direct replacement is not safe enough to recommend.

3. A better solution is to replace the HDD also, with a Compact Flash card. It has quite a number of strengths over the original HDD solution: (a) It is faster (b) It has no spinning noise (c) It consumes even less power and generate virtually no heat.

4. A Compact Flash card can be connected to the original ZIF ribbon cable by a ’1.8″ ZIF to CF adapter’ which is at least 1mm thinner than the original HDD, leaving plenty of space for the battery.

5. Common ZIF to CF adapter made in China can support up to 64GB. I got a 16GB normal speed card cheaply for this purpose. Replace the HDD and battery and they fit just good. You may need to remove the outer wrapper tapes/labels of the new battery to fit.

Now you can run the Dell DJ20 player for over 15 hours per battery charge!!!

Rudolf.

I don’t know where my product manual is, so I’m not sure. I bet if you hunted around on Dell’s site, or called/emailed them about it, they’d be able to tell you. Good luck!