If Your Zune Won’t Turn On

A couple days after getting my Zune, I woke up and went to turn it on – and nothing. Nada. I went online in search for the answer, and found a lot of answers – and none that were the answer I was looking for.In my situation, it was far simpler than all of the crazy solutions I read about. So if you’re a new Zune user, and your Zune won’t turn on, you might have the same problem I had…

The battery went dead and needed charging.

Zune Won’t Turn On

Before you laugh – read on. Naturally, I thought it could be a dead battery, but wrongly assumed that when I plugged it in, the power from the USB cable would immediately wake it up. That is wrong.

If your Zune goes dead, it will take several minutes (give it 10 minutes even) of charging from the USB connection before it will turn on. I believe that’s because the power from the USB cable doesn’t directly power the Zune, so it must charge the battery enough to run first.

If that is not your problem, I did learn of other things to try when researching my “dead” Zune problem. The most common answer I saw was that you need to simply reset the Zune. How to reset your Zune? Simply hold down the back and up button on the control pad. Also, make sure the keypad isn’t locked on the top, so that if you do need to reset it the keys will actually work.

If your Zune ever seems to be acting strange, it might be wise to reset it. This is the exact same as rebooting a computer when it’s giving you problems.

Some people said to merely plug it into the USB cable and that might “wake it up” so to speak.

Other Zune battery tips

I noticed that leaving it on in wireless mode will drain the battery far faster than with wireless mode off. If you use the wireless sync, be sure to turn wireless mode back off as soon as the sync is complete. And if you’re like me and hate to pick up your Zune after a night of sleep, only to see the battery’s charge has gone down, you can also turn the Zune completely off instead of having it go into standby mode. Standby mode allows it to come up faster, but slowly drains the battery over time. Press the back button and push the control pad down and it will power off in a few seconds. Press and hold the play button to turn it on again. It takes longer to power up, but those extra few seconds are easily saved in extended battery time.

So to recap the commands…
Back + Up = Reset/Restart
Back + Down = Turn off, also known as Sleep mode