Software: iTunes and QuickTime Under Vista

It has been a while since I upgraded to Vista, and I am glad I have. However, I am still having problems. The main one that has bothered me recently, that I actually want to be fixed, is that I can not watch my video podcasts. The culprit is not iTunes, it is QuickTime. Basically, when I try to watch a video podcasts, like clockwork, I bluescreen. I actually am scared to click on a podcast under iTunes because I have to suffer through a reboot. (On a side note, reboots on Vista are not that bad. They are about the same as XP except software starts working faster but the actual loading of files into RAM takes forever because of the cache that Vista uses.) I am really fed up with the crashing and I was excited when there was an update for QuickTime, but just today I tried playing a podcast (after preparing for a reboot) and yet again I received a bluescreen.

Look up, that is the bluescreen that keeps popping up. Actually, the bluescreen comes in two flavors. One, which I was getting at first, was only being shown for a few seconds and then Vista would reboot happily. However, I have now been getting a bluescreen that stays up long enough for me to get out my camera and take a picture of the screen. This specific type of bluescreen is one of those enjoyable ones where it freezes the audio output on a loop and a nice screeching loop of the first sound of the movie is played.

Lately I have been having to watch the podcasts that I really want to watch on their websites. I really have been watching a lot fewer podcasts since I upgraded to Vista.