Vista vs iTunes

Why is it that nothing ever seems to go as planned when new software comes out?

I was quite happy using iTunes on my old PC running Windows XP. I loaned my laptop to my 18 year old step son who managed to destroy it in 3 weeks, even though it had given me 3 years of faithfully service all over the world!

So off I go to buy a nice shiny new laptop – which runs Windows Vista, the 32-bit version. Eventually I decided that it was about time I restored some of the files from my old laptop (I had a backup on a remote hard drive) to the new machine, and copied all my music files etc across.

Part 2. I upgrade my mobile phone to an 8Gb iPhone 3G. Lovely bit of kit, but needs iTunes to even switch the thing on. Needless to say, I downloaded the latest version of iTunes for 32-bit Vista, get the phone fired up and transfer a load of tunes.. Wonderful!

Then I try to read a CD…..

Windows Vista now refuses to read CDs or DVDs – a problem that I’m sure thousands of other Vista users have come across. After removing and re-installing iTunes I’m still left with the same problem, but I managed to find a rather tricky solution which involves tampering with the windows registry. A link to the solution can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461/en-us

I can now read CDs and DVDs again, but each time I start iTunes, I’m informed that I need to re-install it!!

It all still seems to work though, so I reckon that’s a small price to pay, unless someone knows of a permanent cure…