Artist’s depiction of the iPod user who syncs with iTunes on Vista.
My primary work machine is a 12″ 1.33 GHz PowerBook, which came with a 60GB hard drive. Since it’s the machine I rely on for my work as tech evangelist — a strange hodgepodge of marketing, blogging, schmoozing, coding, podcasting, video editing, accordion playing and graphic design — my hard drive space is as precious as water in the desert.
That means that my iTunes library — about 35GB — typically lives on my Windows machine with iTunes sharing turned on. One of the things I will have to say about Wintel machine vendors is that they aren’t as stingy with the hard drives as the folks in Cupertino are. My current Windows machine is “The Taint”, the Vista-pre-loaded Acer Ferrari sent to me by Microsoft just over a month ago. With a hard drive size of 160GB before formatting, The Taint offers almost three times as much ferromagnetic real estate as my main axe.
(In case you were wondering, my old Windows machine — a refurbed HP Pavilion of indeterminate model, 3.2Gig P4 and 640MB RAM — now runs Ubuntu. For the first time, I’m running Linux on my desktop on a decent developer machine rather than a cast-off. It’s nice.)
Having such a setup, I read the Telegraph article, Apple warns iPod users against Vista, with a mix of interest and amusement. After all, the article title certainly sounds like “General Electric warns consumers that they heard on a discussion board on the ‘net that Sylvania lightbulbs give off some kind of toxic gas, just sayin’.”
The gist of the story:
It claims some have found that songs bought on its iTunes Store will not play on the new system, and that other Vista users have even seen their iPods corrupted when they try to unplug them. The contacts and calendar functions on iPods are also said to be affected.
A statement on Apple’s website reads: “iTunes Store purchases may not play when upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows 2000 or XP.
“Ejecting an iPod from the Windows System Tray using the Safely Remove Hardware feature may corrupt your iPod.”
I use 2nd-gen 4-gig iPod Nano with The Taint, and haven’t had any problems with file corruption or playing purchases from the iTunes store. I’m running iTunes 7.0.2.16 and have a reasonably fresh (but not the newest) flash upgrade on the Nano, and it’s “so far, so good.” If I run into any of the difficulties that Apple mentions in the article, I’ll post them here.
Are any readers out there mixing iTunes, iPods and Vista? Let us know in the comments!
3 replies on “Living Dangerously with Vista, iTunes and the iPod”
[…] Global Nerdy: Living dangerously with Vista, iTunes and the iPod “I use 2nd-gen 4-gig iPod Nano with [a Vista-pre-loaded Acer Ferrari], and haven’t had any problems with file corruption or playing purchases from the iTunes store.” […]
What is the origin of the picture above – with all the german shepherds staring at the cat as it passes?
@Chris Rogers: I wish I knew! It’s a picture that’s been floating about the internet for some time; it was forwarded to me by a friend who in turn got it forwarded to her, and so on.