Quite recently I had a vivid dream about running Vista Home Premium edition under Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization—a process that this version of Vista’s end user license agreement (EULA) strictly forbids. (Which would explain why I performed the operation in my own private dream-world rather than in the meat-and-dirt world.) During the dream I installed Vista Home Premium on my 2.66GHz Mac Pro using Apple’s latest Boot Camp beta and, because Vista’s EULA does allow this, I thought I’d try it in the real world as well.
Without going into the kind of gross detail I provided in that first dreamy look, I have a couple of observations about how Vista got along with the music applications I installed and the music players I attempted to use with it.
Doing diagnostics
Here’s one for the Mac users: Did you have any notion that the Windows version of iTunes 7.0.2 includes a Run Diagnostics command under the Help menu? Neither did I and yet there it is. Select the thing and you see that you can run three varieties of diagnostics—Network, DVD/CD, and iPod.
Network diagnostics lays out the details of how your network is connected and configured and it tells you if iTunes’ sharing is blocked by Windows’ built-in firewall. (When iTunes launches Windows will alert you to the fact that it’s blocking iTunes and asks you—in one of the OS’s seemingly never-ending “Are you sure you want to do this?” requests—if you’d like to let iTunes pass through the firewall.)
The results of the CD/DVD diagnostic mean just about nothing to me—lots of technical gobblydegook with the occasional useful factoid such as the brand of drive your machine has and its read and write capabilities.
iPod diagnostics’ results are even more arcane and, frankly, I was lucky to see them at all. As you may have heard, Apple suggests that if you really, really care about your iPod and iTunes, you hold off on installing Vista because of some incompatibilities between the latest version of iTunes and the latest version of Microsoft’s OS. Microsoft has fired back with bluster along the lines of “Hey, we gave you that code ages ago! iTunes should be up to speed so don’t blame us! Buy Vista now, now, now! ”
Loony Zuney
(I can’t resist offering this slightly snide aside: When I attempted to connect my Zune to my Mac running Vista I was asked to insert the Zune software CD. Shortly after doing so an error appeared telling me that this software was not compatible with Vista and I should contact Microsoft for additional information. Figuring that even Microsoft couldn’t be so lame as to publicly chide Apple for its iTunes progress while failing to support its own music player, I searched Microsoft’s site for answers. After a significant amount of digging I finally discovered a bit of buried small print that told me the latest version of the Zune software was compatible with Vista. No patch was available to update the software I had. Rather I just had to know to download and install the latest Zune software from the Zune site. During that installation my Mac locked up. On restart the installation eventually completed successfully.)
iTunes and Vista
Apple has released the iTunes Repair Tool for Vista 1.0, which deals with the single onerous problem that your iTunes purchased music may not play on a PC running Vista, but other problems remain. For example, if you use Vista’s Safely Remove Hardware feature, your iPod may not indeed be removed safely. Rather, its data could be scrambled. Apple suggests that if you must run iTunes under Vista and use an iPod with it, you eject the iPod via iTunes rather than from the System Tray and the SRH command.
In this KnowledgeBase article Apple also notes:
- iPod models with the “Enable Disk Use” option turned off may be unable to update or restore iPod software, and make changes to iPod settings.
- iPod models configured to Auto Sync and have the “Enable Disk Use” option turned off may require being ejected and reconnected to resync.
Truer words were never written. My 2GB 2G nano quickly appeared in iTunes’ Source list and just as quickly disappeared. I knew that I could keep the iPod in the Source list by enabling the Enable Disk Use option in the iPod’s Summary preference but the nano didn’t give me time enough to make the setting stick. I finally worked around it by loading a couple of dozen new music tracks into iTunes. Because the iPod was configured to sync automatically, I was able to change its Disk Use settings while it was occupied copying the music from the iTunes library to the iPod.
To avoid this sort of rigmarole, Apple suggests that you enable disk use for your iPod in an earlier version of Windows. Good idea, as that setting is stored on the iPod and will hold when you eventually jack it into a computer running Vista.
Better yet, either wait to install Vista or, if you just can’t help yourself, hold off on using your iPod with Vista until Apple ships the next version of iTunes (the one compatible with Vista), which is expected in a couple of weeks.