Vista and portable electronics.

Vista and portable electronics...the two key ingredients for weeks of pain.

My HTC Touch had been getting flakier and flakier in its connection to my Vista notebook...requiring reboots of both on a regular basis...yet randomly.

Well to turn up the heat in the pain category a bit, I bought a refurbished 40gig iPod (for use in the car...permanently). I made the disastrous mistake of attempting to use it on my Vista machine.

The first plug in popped up the USB device not recognized warning...installing iTunes did not change that a bit...nor did reboots. I was afraid I got a damaged item...so I tried to plug it into my XP desktop...couldn't get iTunes to run on that one.

Then I tried Ubuntu...I think it actually works there, but BANSHEE (linux iPod software) was intermittant...but did access the ipod just fine.

Finally I dug out my old XP laptop (with a twitchy touchpad) installed iTunes, and happily put files on the iPod.

Oh, but back on the Vista machine, my Sprint Touch phone was no longer recognized...I restored the previous windows...etc...eventually (again randomly) it started to connect again...then windows did a HTC USB driver update (from a year ago) and it stopped connecting again.

I decided to put the correct ROM on the Touch (instead of the hacked one I put on a year ago)...we will see what the long term effects of that are.

The moral of the story is hurry up and ship Windows7 so I can dump Vista.