Six months ago I published a guide to the complete disassembly of the Creative Zen Vision W personal media player. At the end of that post I theorized as to how one could upgrade the hard drive when larger ones came available.

Well now, thanks to the generosity of Aaron Vronko and RapidRepair.com for supplying a 100GB drive; and Dan, one of my loyal readers, for playing guinea pig using my previous post to repair his Zen, I now have the largest drive in any Zen W in the world – and the theory is now a reality!

Here is how it was done.
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After my previous review of the Zen Vision W I had a reader Ask the Man the following question:

Hi,

I just got myself a Zen W last X-mas. I think it’s fantastic as well. I bought the 30gb instead of the 60gb thinking I could probably upgrade the hard drive to a higher capacity eventually.

Do you think it’s possible or know what kind of hard disk format they have in those machines?

Thanks One Man!

No, thank YOU for the question! As far as the answer is concerned, there’s only one way to find out… crack that puppy open!
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Ahh, toys… the latest one to enter the fold is the Creative Zen Vision W personal media player. This device does just about everything.

But is it any good? Well, read on to find out.
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So, someone gave you a new iPhone, IPod video, Creative Zen Vision, Archos PVR or other fancy device for the holiday and now you need to know how to copy your DVDs to it so you can take them with you?

Or maybe you didn’t get one of those, but you’d like to load a few movies onto your laptop for when you travel? I also encountered these issues so, after wasting almost two entire days searching for a simple guide and installing at least 10 different programs, I finally decided on two different methods to share. I hope this saves someone else countless hours wasted.
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