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A friend of mine recently encountered an error upon launching iTunes from his newly purchased Vista machine. The error said something about "My Music folder contains an invalid character" and would then display another fatal error then fail to launch. This problem persisted through all of the troubleshooting steps Apple advises for removing and reinstalling iTunes here. After hearing many other Vista tales of woe, I finally recommended that he just upgrade to Windows XP. So this is my advice to him (standard disclaimers apply):

There are a couple of ways of going about the install, the most important thing to realize is that the install is going to annihilate everything you now have on your C drive. So I would suggest to go through your folders and drag any files you consider remotely important over to your external drive. Not programs, they will have to be reinstalled. Make sure [Significant Other] takes a look as well. If you have been using the computer for long then I would recommend making an image of the drive (see the last paragraph in this post) so that you can restore to exactly the same condition if you aren't happy with the changes. If the current condition is flawed then maybe that would be a lot of trouble to go through just to get back to a flawed condition. If nothing else you should be able to use the recovery cd's that came with the computer (warning: not all manufacturer's provide recovery cd's, and not all computer users can remember where they put them).

Open iTunes and select Store, Deauthorize computer (since you will be deleting that installation you don't want it to count as one of your allowed authorized systems anymore).

So after you've removed everything important from your C drive, go ahead and disconnect the DSL line. Also, you might as well disconnect external drives/devices to be safe.

Now put the XP install disk in the top CD bay and restart your computer. If it boots to the XP CD then skip to the next step, if it doesn't then restart and push F2, F8, F10, DEL, CTRL, or whatever the splash screen tells you to access the BIOS settings page. Look for "Boot Order" or "Boot Devices" and make sure that "CD" is listed, enabled, and first in the sequence. After that, "Save changes and exit", then reboot and the XP CD should load.

Next step: accept the license terms, let it use your C drive for the installation. At this point it should be fairly straight-forward to go through the rest of the install process, just follow the prompts and once it is doing its thing it will chug along for 20 minutes or so. If you see anything unexpected or unusual, please call me and I'd be glad to help. It will reboot once or twice. After it comes up with the Welcome page, set your internet settings to "automatically detect" and "automatic DNS" or something like that and skip the registration. After you get to the desktop, remove the install CD and plug in your DSL line. Go to the "Network Connections" control panel and make sure that the firewall is on and that it is connected. Now go to the Start menu and select "Windows Update". After that loads it should give you the chance to use "Microsoft Update", go ahead and select that. Accept all the critical updates, go to the optional updates and select the ones you need (it doesn't really matter one way or another, I usually grab everything except the Microsoft .Net 3.0 framework -- no one is really using it yet). Click on "download and install", accept the terms, and come back awhile later. You will probably need to click ok a couple of times to activate windows, download and accept the genuine windows validation thingy, accept a couple of things for IE7, and eventually restart. Then you need to go to the Start menu and run Microsoft Update again.

I would recommend that you go here and get Microsoft Defender. It is a good anti-spyware tool, and is free. I just run it with the default settings and it works fine and is unobtrusive.

A very good anti-virus tool (Grisoft AVG) is available here and is free. Just download and run, it is straight-forward and with automatic updates is pretty much start-it-and-forget-about-it. I would recommend however that the first time you run it, check the "remember this" box and "from internet" when it asks where to get your updates from, do not set up the automatic scan scheduler (I would just start a manual scan once in a while when you are going to bed) -- otherwise it might start a scan right when you are working on something, and click the "Check for updates" button.

I think that most of the "Complete protection" packages that try to do the firewall, anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-spamming, anti-phishing, heuristic anti-fungal etc ad nauseum stuff are overkill and will most likely make setting things up more difficult, and make your computer slower. Especially Norton, ugh.

You should go to your computer manufacturer's website, search for your model number, then download and install any updated drivers available for your system.

Download a fresh installer for iTunes, and when it comes up be sure and go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, General, iTunes Music Folder Location, and put in the path to your "Music" folder on the external drive. You probably also want to check the boxes for "Let iTunes keep the music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library". While you are in there check the "Importing" tab and select "Import using mp3 encoder" and at least 160 kbps quality. I also always check "Use error correction" otherwise you can get pops in your music if doing anything on the computer while it is importing.

Install Firefox, PDF Creator (like Adobe Acrobat but free), OpenOffice (an open source suite compatible with and in my opinion better than Microsoft Office), and any other software that is important to you, and you should be good to go!

At this point you will have a pretty lean, clean fresh install of Windows. This is a great time to make an image of the drive, so that if something goes awry later you can restore to exactly the same condition. An "image" is different from just backing up files, in that you would be able to extract the image onto a replacement hard drive if your original died and everything would work perfectly without having to go through installation and configuration. Or if you got a virus because *someone* (fight amongst yourselves) opened an amusing email attachment (gasp) then you could just extract the image and everything would be back to how it was without wondering if you completely cleaned the virus -- some viruses can be very pernicious. For this task I personally use DriveImageXML which is another great free open source tool and is much better than commercial tools I've spent quite a bit of money on previously (like Ghost). Just download and run it, it will ask you which drive to image, and where to put the image. Just put it on the external drive, if you want to you it lets you save the image in pieces so that you can write it to a series of DVDs or CDs. It is always a good idea to back up important documents routinely of course, but you only need to make an image after big changes to your system. And you only need to image the main drive, it is only necessary to copy (ie drag-and-drop) files that are external drives since they are not running programs that are sensitive to their location and configuration. It is best to have everything closed while running this, and not use the computer. It can take quite awhile to finish, 20 minutes to a couple of hours depending on the size of the drive and your external drive's speed, so you might want to run it at bedtime.