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.