I found it particularly interesting as my wife and I have debates about our music collections - she uses iTunes with an iPod and I have my whole collection in ogg format and have a nice little Samsung mp3 player. Everytime I have to lend her some support (which mainly consists of updating either the iPod or iTunes every single time it is hooked up to the PC) I'm always grumbling and she is always asking why.

Things got particularly funny the last time as iTunes would not let me transfer a song she had purchased to the iPod because the iPod needed an update. When I tried to do that, it wanted the PC to reboot (huh???). Upon doing that, I could not get the PC to reboot - just got to the XP splashscreen with the green progress bar. I finally figured out how to use the restore utility from Safe mode to get the blasted thing running again and I have not retried it since. So much for the whole "it just runs" concept of Windows.

In an interesting side note, over the past couple days I've been getting my PC and laptop up to speed after some updates. I happened to find this awesome article on making SuSE 10.1 the perfect desktop. Following those directions, I was watching DVD's using VLC in no time. I was not so lucky with XP Pro on my laptop. As I discovered, even though Windows is supposed to be such a great multimedia system out of the box, it will not play a DVD (at least not a commercial DVD). No, you have to install a DVD decoder and unless you hunt like I did, they all cost $$$. And here I was under the impression that such functionality was a native part of Windows.