t Sends email to Gris in blatant self interest.

I do so love to tinker.

My external hard drives are all USB/firewire and I don't have a video camera. Don't really require the firewire these days, though it does annoy me on principle.

I also don't need audio ports very often. Maybe the input if I ever decide to do any recording, but I actually have a USB converter for microphones and my electric piano does USB-midi out, so just a headphone out should be plenty.

So it looks like the MacBook is for me.

DCJ, I'll e-mail you back later. I'm going to salvage the hard drive and maybe the RAM from the MacBook so I'm not sure what remaining parts will help you. Maybe the battery. The computer smells like burning - I think I fried the motherboard pretty good with an accidental Diet Dr. Pepper soaking.

I have another one coming at some point, so any part of a dead one might get me that much closer to a Frankensteinian creation.

Or is that Fronkensteenian?

Apparently if you get rid of QuickTime, iTunes doesn't work. That's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that you have to reinstall iTunes and lose all your music, podcasts and playlists. How is that remotely acceptable?

It wouldn't surprise me, but I just got a new computer at work and copied over my library files before installing iTunes and had no problem.

You can just reinstall Quicktime. Maybe that will bring back iTunes without destroying anything.

I have not run into reinstall wiping all my settings. Huh.

Can't it just rebuild the library from the files on your disk, I mean aside form podcast subscriptions? I don't know how iTunes works I'm just curious.

You can install Quicktime as a separate piece. Are you on Windows or Mac? On both platforms iTunes relies on Quicktime to do the actual audio decoding. I don't see how that's any more ridiculous than windows media player not working if you delete Direct Sound, or not working with certain file types if you are running an old install of DirectX.

You can just reinstall Quicktime. Maybe that will bring back iTunes without destroying anything.

This is on my husband's computer. Last night I tried to get rid programs he wasn't using (the PC is on its last legs). What happened so far is that when he tried to open iTunes, it said, "you can't open iTunes w/o QT. Uninstall and reinstall iTunes." He tried to just install QT -- it just installed another clean copy of iTunes, replacing all his playlists and settings, but not the music (not that it found his music, of course).

This is the nth time IME that iTunes has done something like this -- I don't understand why this software is like this.

Also this is my fault for not making sure his music was backed up.

On both platforms iTunes relies on Quicktime to do the actual audio decoding. I don't see how that's any more ridiculous than windows media player not working if you delete Direct Sound, or not working with certain file types if you are running an old install of DirectX.

I didn't know that, but the way that it appears to a casual user like me is a software that is separate from iTunes, but is generally bundled with it. I wouldn't expect Word to stop working and lose all my settings if I uninstalled Excel.