Vista, Nvidia and iTunes, Again.

So today, my wonderful geek husband got fed up with my laptop being unable to sync video to my iPhone directly from my hard drive. He put in a phone call to HP and asked if it would be possible for them to provide us with Windows XP recovery discs. He was told they would have to contact a supervisor to authorize it, and waited for the call back. The call back didn’t assist us at all. Not only would HP not be able to provide us with XP recovery discs, but if I choose to downgrade my machine to XP from Windows Vista, my warranty on this machine is void.

WTF?

As I have pointed out many times before, my phone is my life. If there were one other device in my life that were second to that, it would have to be my laptop. For the past five years, I have been very happy with the HP and Compaq machines that we have purchased, and have gotten a great deal of use out of them. Ninety percent of that happiness has derived from the fact that I’ve never had to call HP customer support with a problem, but this is too much. Not only did the customer support staff not speak English very well, but “John”, “Mary” and “Mary” told us that reinstalling Windows Vista would solve this issue, which is positively insane. The problem is the driver for my hard drive, which has not been updated by the manufacturer. How exactly will re-installing the OS fix this problem? Whatever they’re on at HP customer support, they need to start sharing the love.

I didn’t expect HP to actually be able to fix this issue. It’s really not HP’s problem because this is a known issue with iTunes specifically, and everything else works great. What irks me is that I have been told that I am stuck with Windows Vista, and its random BSOD’s from now until my warranty is out in July. Hopefully by then, Microsoft will have updated Windows Vista to the point where I can stand to use it, and this will be a non-issue, but if not, as soon as the warranty is up, you better believe this cookie is downgrading.

To switch targets a bit, I am supremely irritated at Apple right now, far more than I am that my husband had to speak to a customer support center in India that is filled with idiots who don’t speak enough English to diagnose technical support issues. My hard drive controller’s manufacturer, Nvidia, states that there are no problems with the hard drive or the controller and that they have referred this issue back to Apple’s application dev team for iTunes, who has done absolutely jack about the problem.

At least one other guy on the planet is just as irritated about this problem as I am, and has posted a comment on CNet’s boards regarding it.

And here’s a thread about it from SIX MONTHS AGO, regarding the exact same issue I am now encountering.

And here’s an article on a blog about a similar issue with Quicktime, dating back to July of last year, with comments as current as January 6th. I promise, none of those comments are mine.

And finally, this is a thread on the Apple discussion forums regarding the problem.

If this doesn’t show that there’s some extreme neglect going on here, I don’t know what does.