I eventually gave up trying to install iTunes on the Vista PC due to the .pcast registry key being generated with no owners and therefore there were no permissions to allow iTunes to update it. Hence each time I started iTunes it wanted to complete the setup process. Bit of an infinite loop.

I did phone Apple’s technical support and they were very friendly and helpful but they prefer MACS and they ran out of ideas. One of their ideas was to create a new admin user and try installing iTunes from that account, which I did, but got the same problem. I have a feeling this might be something to do with installing some Asian client software for watching live sport over the net a few weeks ago. One of the clients was actually called Pcast, the name of the registry key that was giving me hell.

There didn’t seem to be anyway forward so I dug out the HP recovery discs and let them restore the PC to the state I bought it in January 2007. That process, including Vista checking the speed of the PC and creating local settings and a username must have taken an hour. I then plugged in an Ethernet cable that was connected to the wireless router, I couldn’t be bothered finding the old Belkin wireless adapter driver, and ran Windows Update. That found and downloaded 75 updates and then started installing them. At no 11 it stalled. This might well have been because whilst these updates were being processed I uninstalled Norton (Installing and uninstalling in parallel, interesting. Ed).

Reran the recovery process and left it alone overnight. Later I’ll just do the Windows updates and nothing else. That will no doubt include the download of the Windows Installer, probably more than 75 updates, IE8 and additionally I’ll download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility so that I can remove all of the software originally installed on the PC.

I tried using Windows Easy Transfer with a Belkin cable, which I have successfully used before, but yesterday it just wouldn’t connect the two PC’s.

I eventually bought another cable and installed a driver for that and after messing about for a while got it working. One of the transfers I had started I realised was wrong, in that I was sending to the Vista PC something I didn’t want to, so I cancelled the transfer. After that when I plugged the cable back into the XP machine and the WET software started I got an error message that said ‘Failed to initialize the logging system’. I spent some time uninstalling, reinstalling and rebooting but made no progress. Did a search on Google which didn’t come up with much though one person said to rename your profile. Not quite clear enough. Gave up for a while and thought about it and came up with no eureka moments. Hmm.. different profile, maybe me cancelling a transfer has left something lying around that is stopping WET from working.

Rather than amending my profile, erm how, I created a new admin user and tried that and it worked.

Installing iTunes on Vista though is turning out to be a right pain (How come you have so much trouble with all this stuff, works OK for everyone else? Ed). I have installed it OK but when I click on the icon to run iTunes it wants to run some kind of setup and specifically associate music files with iTunes, which stalls. A window opens and nothing happens. I have manually associated .mp3 files with iTunes but nevertheless each time I click on the iTunes icon we’re back to the associate music process. I’ve had a look on Google and there are a lot of possible work arounds including making amendments to the registry to amend some keys. I did try one but it made no difference. Someone posted that there are twenty keys to amend.

By coincidence this afternoon I was near an Apple store so I asked them whether they had any ideas but of course they are all mac guys so they couldn’t help. They did give me a number to ring for windows & iTunes technical support so will call them if I can’t sort this out myself.

I was thinking about moving iTunes from the XP to the Vista machine, so I had a look at the Apple site to see what they suggested. I found the instructions, and there was a lot of them, so I printed them off so that I could read them on the way to work (Not 3 steps then? Ed).

There were 8 pages of instructions or steps and it isn’t for the feint hearted. The steps were for a PC with an internal hard drive and obviously no chance of connecting it to another PC. Having said that with wireless peer to peer connectivity you could probably import the tracks from the XP machine into the Vista machines iTunes over wireless. Dunno how long 300 gig would take but it ain’t gonna be quick.

The Apple solution was to put the iPod into disk mode and copy the music into iTunes directly. With 300 gig of music, podcasts, movies, iPhone applications, photo’s and who knows what else and a 160 gig iPod this is still going to be two round trips, and it’ll be a miracle if I don’t forget something. Hell, removing 160 gig’s worth of stuff from an iPhone and reloading it with another 140 gigs worth would take days. And something is bound to go wrong (Yeah, whatever happened to tape streamers? Ed).

My iTunes folder is on an external USB drive so the obvious thing for me to do is just plug it into the Vista machine and point iTunes at that. But what about the iTunes .itl and .xml files. If I point iTunes at the external drive and there is no .itl or .xml file I assume all of the music and films will need to be freshly imported which I also assume will then generate new .itl and .xml files and which will point to music on the external drive.

Instead of the fresh import I could copy over the .itl and .xml files from the XP machine to the Vista machine. And put them where? Currently on XP they are on the C: drive’s My Documents folder and point to the iTunes folder on the external drive, which is drive L:. If that same drive, when connected to the Vista machine, is say, the K: drive then the .itl and .xml files will be point at the wrong drive. Groan. Maybe I just tell iTunes that the music is on the K: drive and leave it to sort itself out.

What about photos, podcasts, contacts and iPhone apps? The photos and iPhone apps are in their own folders so I will just need to copy them over wireless to the same folder structure on Vista. Podcasts I haven’t a clue where they are. Contacts? They’re buried in Outlook which means I will need to move the Outlook.pst file to the Vista machine which will give me the existing emails and contacts but none of the settings. This is getting way too complicated. How do less savvy people do this stuff or when they get a new PC do they just lose everything.

Having given the last issue some more thought I’ve remembered that I have some Easy transfer software on a disc and a cable and that should be able to move the Outlook setup from the XP machine to the Vista machine. In fact if this whole idea is feasible, the moving of iTunes from one machine to another, then the first step has to be can I transfer the Outlook world from XP to Vista.

Then do the photos, then the iPhone apps, then the .itl and .xml files, then attach the external drive to Vista. Then start iTunes and let it know about the external drive. Then pray. And do I then dare sync the iPhone and iPod with the Vista version of iTunes? (If you do they’ll probably be empty afterwards. Ed).