Philips Streamium SLA5500 Wireless MP3 player

These little units worked well for us with our "slug" running Twonkymedia, and we ended up buying three over the years, using them around the house.

However, over the past year, they stopped working, one by one. Two succumbed to the "blue screen of death" (as described in the FAQ on the Philips site), and the final straw was the third suddenly could not "find" the home network.

I was able to recover all three using the procedure in the FAQ, but the following tips might help someone with the same problem:

1. The procedure requires setting your home wifi network to an SSID of 'Philips" with no encryption. The instructions are incorrect - the SSID should have all characters lower-case.

2. The Utility software set up does not work if you have it unpacked in too "deep" a subdirectory. I got it to work my moving its directory to the Desktop, then running Setup.

3. The unit that could not find the network showed up straight away. Even though it showed as having current firmware, reinstalling the firmware brought it back to life.

4. The other two were not detected until I did a power-on reset (i.e., sticking a paper clip in the hole above the power connector, and holding the button down while plugging in, then releasing when the screen lit up. They had no coherent firmware version showing in the Utility - reinstalling the firmware brought them back to a working state.

I'm thinking these units are somewhat susceptible to power surges (we go through periods of brief power interruptions), so I will make sure they are plugged into good surge suppressors now.