Windows Sucks!

I know that headline will not come as a surprise to anyone, but I have been reminded, yet again, of this inarguable fault. My new iPod - conked out the first time I tried synching it; so I tried it again, left it running overnight - and of course, it's conked out again in the morning. Now this is very annoying: I'm wondering what's to blame (and how to fix it) - I poked around the documentation and online without much luck. And then I notice, the documentation all says to plug the machine into the USB port. That can't be right, I think - I try to remember what the cable looked like, and start to get a sinking feeling - I take a good look, and yes indeed: USB!

That's annoying. So I try again with the firewire cable the 60gig iPod used, but nothing. So I go online, thinking, Apple has cleverly managed to lure me into spending an extra $50 on a firewire cable for this thing. Typical, I think... Until I realize - there IS no firewire cable! the new iPods ONLY synch through USB! It's NOT apple greed - it's pandering to the poor suckers who bought Windows machines! It'll take me a week to get this thing working and a month to get all my music onto it! Damn it all to hell!

Thanks again, Microsoft, for making the world a worse place.

UPDATE: Rather than add a new post or a comment, I'll add a word or two to this. First - I have to admit that the real problem is the computer: the iPods work with USB 2.0, and this old thing has only 1.1; that's the underlying problem. One I hope I can avoid addressing until next year, though I don't think it's worth trying to squeeze much more than that out of this thing. Second: the other real problem is not so much that the process is slow, but that it died in the middle - and now, I've managed to make it so it won't do a thing: connect the iPod, and iTunes hangs. Terrible! I can't get at any options to restore the iPod, to switch to manual updates or anything like that - nothing. That's a good deal worse than slowness. Third - though I realize now that these USB only machines have been around a while - it's worth noting that I have one, a shuffle - which is slow, but works fine with this computer - so it's not just the hardware.

But all this whining is beside the point - because the old warhorse, the old photo iPod from 2 plus years ago - suddenly started working again, after I charged it all the way. Hooray! It is just the battery! I might get to next year after all...