Bloggit's Journal - Vista Of Doom

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Vista Of Doom

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Bloggit's Journal started as an experiment, but has since morphed into a window into Bloggit's technical addiction. And honestly, I had no idea I was so unbalanced. So enjoy the fruits of my condition.

April 2008

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Vista Of Doom	Feb. 10th, 2008 @ 10:49 am

I've mentioned before my BSOD woes with Vista on my new QuadCore box. They continue unabated. A few days ago iTunes would blue screen the system when playing a certain video podcast in mere minutes. So I decided to try it under XP.

It took me a while to get XP running in a dual-boot configuration. Issues include that XP only reads drivers (during install) off of floppy and, of course, I don't have a floppy, and that it failed to put an NTLDR in place. Debugging all this was harder than it sounds because XP could see and write to the SATA drives without the drivers... but it couldn't properly uncompress everything! And the lack of the NTLDR doesn't result in a clear message. But eventually I got everything up and running in dual boot mode.

And then ran into issues installing iTunes. Getting Vista and XP to use the same "library" (itl file), so that the podcast data, iPod data and playlists apply, isn't hard... but it isn't obvious either. The trick is to hold "Shift" while itunes starts, and then when asked, point at the desired itl. Which is not where your "library" is (meaning media files). It's more likely in your "My Music" directory regardless of any settings you've made.

Okay, iTunes is up, but it won't play any purchased music! It turns out that the Operating System is one of the parameters used to determine an "Authorization". So of my 5 authorizations, one is needed for when running under Vista, and one when running under XP. This doesn't actually have any pragmatic impact on me because, despite having computers everywhere, I decommission iTunes before junking them and I usually simply use the iPod rather than sharing auths on iTunes.

Now iTunes plays some of the purchased music, but skips much of it, in both operating systems. That turned out to be because the iTunes I installed (over the previous one) was one version back. Apparently the AAC files care what version they run on. Since I had installed iTunes to one place (twice, to get the registry settings in both operating systems), it screwed both up. But only the XP version would allow an upgrade, because the Vista iTunes really thought it was at the newest version. None-the-less, upgrading in XP fixed Vista. Apparently iTunes only checks a registry key for the version data.

All that said, now iTunes is running on both operating systems, with the same files, with the same media. Try the podcast again. Yep, still dies in Vista. Works like a charm in XP. No crash, no blue screen.

I have a litany of other issues too. A Western Digital MyBook, that worked well on my previous system under XP, sometimes hangs Explorer in Vista and cannot apparently be formatted in Vista although Vista will happily try for hours with no progress. It works fine in XP. I am reformatting it (in XP, since I can't in Vista) to see if that helps with Vista any.)

One of my friends has a Vista box also. He's had no problems. He's not quite the power user I am, but he says he can reliably run Firefox and notepad. His computer is next to a refrigerator dedicated to cooling a CO2-pressurized (i.e. not hand-pump) keg, so our priorities may not be identical.

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