2. Installation

In my case, installation for the 20 GB DJ can be summed up in one word: painful. Both the Quick Start Guide and User Manual give approximately the same installation directions. They start out by saying that you shouldn't connect the DJ until you are prompted to. The installation disc is of the autorun variety, though you can also navigate to the CD and double click on setup.exe to start the installation. The first screen you see tells you that the following components will be installed: Dell File Manager, Dell Digital Jukebox Drivers and Musicmatch Jukebox. The only customization you are allowed is to change the directory in which the software is installed. During installation, the software detected that I had a newer version of Musicmatch Jukebox on my computer and gave me the option to keep it. However, by choosing not to install the older version (which I realized was a Dell-branded clone of an older version), I received a message saying that installation would stop. It turned out that it only stopped the installation of Musicmatch and continued to install the drivers, etc., needed for the Dell DJ. It would have been nice here to get a message letting you know that keeping the newer version of Musicmatch wouldn't stop the entire installation of the device. I eventually received a message saying that the installation was complete and that I needed to restart my computer. Great.

I restarted my computer, expecting to see a message telling me to hook up the Dell DJ, but none appeared. I hooked it up without being prompted and it wasn't recognized. I shut the computer down, hooked up the device and restarted and it still wasn't recognized. I went into Musicmatch Jukebox's Portable Device Manager and tried to add the DJ. That step takes you to Musicmatch's website, where you can download and install plug-ins and drivers for various devices. This too, I tried to no avail. After going through the installation process a couple of times from the disc, letting it install the older version of Musicmatch and still having no luck, I thought I might have a bad installation disc or that my CD-ROM drive was dieing on me, so I downloaded the installation program from Dell's website and started the whole process again. Still no device recognition. I figured that either I was an idiot or that the device itself might have been reviewed by some chimpanzee before me who dropped it.

I went to Dell's community forum about the Jukebox and saw that some people were having the same problem of plugging the DJ into a hub rather than directly into a PC. Nowhere in the documentation or installation guide are you told this may occur. The powered hub I use works just fine with my digital camera and flash memory storage devices. I plugged in the DJ and on restarting, Windows XP found it, Musicmatch recognized it, but I was still never prompted (as told by the documentation) when to attach it.