NoiseDesign, what I hear everywhere is if you want a copy of vista to play with so you are already used to it when the day comes you can't get by without it buy a copy for a spare machine running non-critical applications. Don't put it on machines important to your business or your personal life. And even when the first patches come out, there will still be too many driver and annoying DRM. Wait as long as possible so as much of the annoying stuff is gone when you use it. Get XP. A reasonable vendor ought to make it available at the same price as VISTA. But if you have to buy a brand that charges extra for XP, consider it a cost of doing business with that brand and get XP. I know some people have bought in new machines and not had problems. But there are overwhelming tales of disaster about even for people who got it bundled with new machines.

Part of my business is building custom machines for audio playback and show control automation. I do it all with OEM XP installations and currently have no plans to move to Vista. Almost all of the audio cards that I use are still not playing well with Vista, and I just finally got some of specials I/O cards off of the ISA bus a few years ago.

Yeah, I should have known. Some of your stuff above seemed to imply you were considering Vista, but I obviously misread it. Sorry.

No worries. My questions were actually based on the fact that I've been avoiding it like the plague so I know very little about Vista.

What I really need to do is take one of my PC's and install Vista on it specifically so that I can start to experiment with it and find out the particular things that it breaks for me.

The very idea of Vista hurts me. But then, the very idea of XP hurts me, and I understand that it has evolved into a pretty good, stable, secure OS. But I definitely remember the days when super-geeks like me were saying "XP sucks, stick with Windows 2000 if you must."

All that said, the last version of Windows I ran on a computer owned by me was Windows '98 SE. Clearly, my Windows knowledge is a bit out of date.

You've convinced me to go with XP, whatever solution I end up with. I'm thinking going cheap, with a reconditioned Windows machine that I can soup up with as much memory (seriously, 4 GB) as I can.

o hey, for those of you who want a 2nd cheap iPod (or a 1st one) The Woot of the day is the 4th gen 20GB iPod (looks like the short lived HP version). Only $99+ $5 shipping. [link]

I'm downloading Parallels. It changed enough since the beta stuff I played with. Plus they bribed me with $10 iTunes gift card, so how could I refuse?

wow, sorry for the running riot of posts today. Y'all must be doing things more than loafing and avoiding work.

Anyhow, the question for the awesome hive mind. Is there a way to take a playlist from an iPod, that was created on the iPod, and export it/copy it/move it back into iTunes? I created some cool lists at work, and now want them saved at home. Eventually hope to actually sync rather than just manual, but I don't want to loose these awesome playlists... or have to recreate them either (BIG playlists).

I have no clue about ipods but I am loafing and avoiding work.