[Phlag]

I bought a Zune a while ago, and then I won a free one. So, in order to return my original Zune (so I could use the money for other things), I decided to go ahead and break my Zune to cash in on the warranty I got (which I got because I've had such terrible problems with MP3 players in the past). It's immoral, I know. That's not the point. This isn't a thread about the morals and ethics of warranty fraud.

My friend and I have tried our DAMNDEST to break this thing - not a crack in the screen, the warranty doesn't cover that. At first we tried pouring water into the headphone and USB jack while leaving the Zune on. No luck. The thing works fine.
Then we filled up the sync, started playing a movie, and left it there for 20 minutes. That seemed like it worked - the video froze after a while. We let the battery drain. The next day, we plugged it into the USB charger to make sure it wasn't working. It was.
Then we started playing music and beating the hell out of it. We pounded it on our floor as hard as possible, switching songs so that it was reading from the hard drive. We passed it back and forth until our hands were sore. The thing is, it kept detecting the trauma. It would stop playing music whenever we hit it especially hard.
Next, we got a power cord, cut off the female end, stripped the wires, and plugged the male end into the wall. Then we put the bare wires into the USB connector. It got zapped good and hard, setting off a fuse. A little bit of the power cord's wiring melted to the inside (which we chipped off). The Zune still worked just fine.
We did it again. It still worked fine. We did it a third time - it's as good as new. It boggles my mind.
My next plan was to reformat it. While it was doing so, we pounded it on the floor with all our strength, hoping to mess up SOMETHING. It froze. We let the battery drain and then charged it up again. This time it came up with an error message: "To recover from an error, Zune must clear all content." I push "Okay," it reboots, and presents the same message. I'm guessing that we could theoretically force a reformat (reboot, then hold return, center, and pause while booting), and things would be back to normal. But I'm willing to bet that Geeksquad doesn't know about that, so they'll probably accept the return. But in reality, the thing still isn't really broken.

With the iPods I've had, the harddrives would fail if I exhaled in their direction. Zunes are GODDAMNED TANKS. They have numerous failsafes to protect the integrity of the hardware. If you bought a Zune - which I highly recommend - rest assured that it will last you a long time. You won't be able to break it if you try.