If this is the sturdiness characterizing the product in general, there may be all the more reason to believe tech professionals pointing out that introducing iTunes to the more "hostile" Windows environment may soon result in successful attacks against the system. New Scientist featured this article a couple of days ago...

What do you lot think the best doze app is? I'll go for Mozilla or one of it's many friends.

If it weren't for a windows version of this I may well have left my job by now and I'm glad too that this works.

As for the worst software ever written on any platform it has to be Outlook. I hate what M$ did to mail.

The first thing we'd need to do is agree on criteria for deciding what makes something the "best". Are we rating on number of fatal bugs? UI design? Usefullness? Overall user experience? No one application is going to be all things to all people. Of course, at a bare minimum, not crashing is probably a good criteria to judge by.

Unfortunately, Mozilla is pretty notoriously unstable, and not just in Windows either. There's still at least one bug in the latest builds that allows a certain Javascript call to crash the browser hard, and random unprovoked crashes aren't uncommon either. I can't speak for vim or Perl, since I don't use either in Windows. As for Outlook, bug-riddled as it may be and virus conduit or not, it's certainly one of the most widely-used and, one might assume, most useful Windows applications (based merely on the fact that so many people use it). I haven't used Outlook in years, but when I did use it, I don't remember it ever crashing on me.

Coincidentally, I've been playing around with Outlook 2003 lately, and frankly I'm kind of impressed. It's fast, sleek, and sort of tempting. But Pine still gets the job done for me.

As for Outlook, bug-riddled as it may be and virus conduit or not, it's certainly one of the most widely-used and, one might assume, most useful Windows applications (based merely on the fact that so many people use it).

Email is useful, people don't know any better than to use the application bundled with their OS (express). That doesn't make it any good. It also encourages HTML, poor formatting and top posting and all things that annoy me about email that I get from Outlook users. I can't speak for 2003 because work haven't made me start using it yet.

Being the aforementioned "housemate Steve", I'd like to chime in- Apple really screwed things up here. You'd think they'd do a more comprehensive job of QA-ing their products before release, especially one that has as much potential as this one, but apparently the rush to market took precedence over thorough testing.

I was able to install it without any problems on my win2k machine at work, and it's just as nice on Windows as it is on my Powerbook, but enough people are having installation and setup problems that there is clearly a major problem with the software.

Oh, and a tip to anybody installing it who has never used iTunes- make sure you don't let it "organize your music"! If it does, it will move all of your stuff around to fit its own organizational scheme... and you will lose whatever existing folder heirarchy you already have. The setting for that is under the "Advanced" tab in the preferences... just de-check the box, and it will leave your directory structure alone.

Things I can't do without:

• Opera


• Commander


• Winamp


• PuTTY


• Communicator

Best Windows application...any web browser that can take you to somewhere with a linux distro.

Had to say it!

Seriously, only Windows app I booted to windows for when I had Windows on my hard drive: Starcraft. That's the best Windows app :p

Although to play devil's advocate, we've installed Windows iTunes and so far it's been working without a hitch - especially cool since we've had lots of music players crash the system (including Winamp, Musicmatch, etc.)

And it does give me cause to say "I'll buy that for a dollar!" a lot more.

That was an interesting post you had there about iTunes. I also have all my music stored on another HD in another machine. I access the files via SMB and have had no problems with iTunes whatsoever. I have about 5,000 or so mp3s that I added to iTunes over SMB without any problems. Could it be a fluke? By the way, there was an update to iTunes for Windows recently, did you try again after it?

-Indigo2