I’m afraid I’m starting this blog with a technology drama, involving my shiny new iPod Shuffle (2nd generation) and Windows Vista. “Ah yes, Vista” you say knowingly. But at Microsoft’s defence leaps the voice of my dear friend who pointed out that the vendors had the Vista code for 2 years prior to the release, so surely they could have sorted out their device drivers by now and what more does Microsoft have to do?
Anyway, following the somewhat limited instructions that came with my birthday present, I downloaded and installed iTunes 7.5.something (the latest and greatest). Only problem was, after running the installation I was presented with a “Please wait while Windows configures iTunes” message .. and finally an error stating it couldn’t stop the iPod Services service. Yuck. No help from the Apple support site either.
OK, I’m in I.T., I can figure this out. Everyday, millions of people buy these things and get them working. OK, maybe not millions.
Google at the ready, it’s becoming more apparent that what seems like a problem with iTunes may in fact be a problem with Quicktime. Enter Gerger’s suggestion re a handy dandy tool for fixing associated registry entries (http://research.gerger.com/?view=lab&aID=1006#h2:4) – didn’t work for me but I sensed it was on the right path. Delved into regedit myself, reset the permissions under HKEY Local Machine / Software / Classes and added my user name with full control (even though it was already a member of the listed Administrators group). Tried the reset.cmd tool again and this got Quicktime working! Victory 1!
Now, back to iTunes 7.5, which will now start but is displaying rather weirdly and gives up (freezes) whenever it feels like it. Trying to sync one song, I get a lock up when I try and eject the iPod (after a sync completed message), and no songs on the iPod to play 🙁
At this point in the story I must confess to my husbands helpfulness when installing Vista. I inherited his laptop, which had a dual-boot XP and Vista partition (of which the XP partition was subsequently removed). This has left Vista as V:, which causes a lovely driver installation issue with anything you install (as it’s not finding the operating system on the C:). It’s been one of those things which is annoying but not annoying enough to completely wipe the thing and start with a fresh install. Only, my new iPod has come along and grabbed the first available drive letter .. so it wants to be C:. Thinking this is not such a good idea, I change it to Y (as in Y am I having so many problems with this damn thing). And hey presto, all is well in the world! iTunes is playing happily, syncing etc, no problems. Also, the high disk and CPU usage I was seeing since the start of this epic journey have miraculously settled down.
Case closed. What a mission. It’s midnight and I have one song on my Shuffle.