Drowned by an Apple Smugstorm

I am no doubt a member of a fairly large group of independent thinkers who consider Apple's unbearably smug adverts smearing Windows in every possible way to be getting tiresome. And that is, of course, an understatement.

What really chaps my ass is that Apple has suffered many of their own indignities over recent years ...

• How many people have had to reinstall iTunes a dozen times? (I have)
• How many times did that fry either your library or your iPod? (several for me)
• How many people *fear* the next iTunes reinstall? (everyone)
• How many have had an iPod die early? (:-))
• How many people have replaced an iPod battery? (I have ... ripping the damned thing completely apart in the process)

Shame on Apple for their arrogance in the face of their lack of perfection ...

But what really bugs me :-) is how poorly they appear to have tested iTunes 9 on Windows 7 with their older iPods. I have the 160GB Classic model and it completely uses up all of my memory on Windows 7, slowing the system to a crawl and crashing other apps.

See this page for a discussion.

Here are the instructions given there to fix the problem ... I'll edit this post when I get a chance to perform them.

Please make a screen shot of your USB drivers in "Device Manager"
I'm looking for Apple Mobile Device.
Perform the following operation:

1. Connect your Apple device to a USB port
2. Listen for the connection, it usually occurs twice in succession.
3. Go to device manager,
4. Go to the end of the device list and expand the usb list.
5. "APPLE MOBILE DEVICE" should be visible.
6. View the screen shot I supplied.

If its not visible you will need to remove all Apple Software, ITunes, Bonjour Apple Mobile Service, everything apple including Quick time must be removed.
Then you must re-install.

Edit: After a complete uninstall of every Apple product, reboot, and installation of the latest iTunes / Quicktime download, things seem ok. I find that the iPod still hammers the USB bus ... but the memory seemed stable this time ... running free memory to zero pretty quickly, but leaving available memory stable throughout the sync.