The Zune HD, pretty ain't it?

Most importantly, it also adds smart DJ which is an auto generated playlists that can be created based on a song, an artist or multiple artists. The neat thing about smart DJ is that if you also subscribe to a Zune pass it will download similar artists and include them in the playlists. Apple did something similar with Genius playlists and they’re only part of iTunes I like. Enough that despite it’s many many flaws iTunes is my mp3 software of choice in OSX.

Ever since I picked up my refurb Zune 30 off woot.com two years ago, I’ve been a huge fan. Sure, the hardware is bulky, and it lacks a fancy scroll wheel but the UI is awesome and the software just keeps getting better and better. Microsoft has done an amazing job releasing updates and new features over the past two years. Sadly, with the release of the Zune HD that Zune 8, 30, and 120 support is at an end but Microsoft seems set to provide the same stellar support for the Zune HD and it’s future siblings.

Curious, when I went over to Best Buy this afternoon to pick up Scribblenauts (which was sold out) I took a look at Zune HD. The demo units weren’t fully functional, they didn’t have any music loaded and it looked as if they hadn’t fully set them up yet. Comparisons to the iPod touch are inevitable and the Zune HD is a smaller more focused device. There’s app support but it’s clearly a secondary feature and kept in a submenu off the main screen. The hardware has vastly improved and the device is much smaller than I expected. The UI is the same sweetness that I love in my current Zune but more touchy. The animations were quick and multi-touch seems to work just as well as the iPod Touch. After seeing it I’ve got total gadget lust, if there were physical control buttons on the device I probably would have bought it on the spot.

Really the Zune HD has just about everything I could ask for in an mp3 player except buttons. I’ve got an iPhone and it’s an amazing multipurpose device, okay phone and a crappy mp3 player. My normal usage phone and internet tends to drain the battery in a day. Adding in two or three hours of mp3 usage on a plane is only going to make that worse. Also, the lack of physical buttons means I constantly have to be looking at the screen to play/pause and switch songs. While it’s only slightly annoying at work, it’s a huge a pain in the ass when I’m driving on the highway.

As it stands right now, I’m on the fence. On the one hand, my trusty Zune is starting to show some wear and the Zune HD is a wicked device and a superb evolution on the design. On the other hand, the idea do fumbling around with it in a car isn’t appealing especially based on my previous experience with the iPhone.

Running an XP repair did nothing, so I installed a second copy of XP alongside the original to let me back up my files. When I was done backing up, I was just planning on doing a clean install of XP. Before I did though, I remembered that I had a copy of Vista from my RIT MSDN account, that I had never gotten around to installing. I’d used it once or twice while fixing other people’s computers but had never actually used it for more than an hour or so. The biggest reason for that was Lenny.

Lenny is about 7 years old now, and not exactly top of the line anymore. At the time I got Vista he was sporting an Athlon XP 2400+, 512 Megs PC2700 RAM and an nVidia Geforce ti4600. XP ran well enough and I knew Vista would run like crap. At some point the ti4600 died and was replaced with a Geforce 6600GT. About six months ago, I was dropping off some stuff at Goodwill and happened to arrive just as someone was dropping off a PC. I checked it out and discovered it was a Pentium 4 2.4GHZ with 512 DDR RAM. Being the scavenger I am, I promptly stole it. When I got it back home I discovered the only things worth keeping were the processor and the RAM. Anyway, the moral of this story is Lenny got an upgrade to a gig of ram and it is kind of sad to see people throwing away computers nearly as good as the one you have.

OK, back to Vista. Freshly upgraded with a new video card and the extra 512 RAM, I decided Vista was with a shot. It was surprisingly painless and I only ran into one major issue. nVidia in their infinite wisdom, decided they weren’t going to release drivers for nForce2 motherboards but Vista figured something out and made it work anyway. Everything else went smoothly. The performance wasn’t blazing but it was good enough for about 90% of the stuff I do on a computer.

After fiddling around with it for a few days, I ended up reformatting again and putting XP back on. At the time I was heavily into TF2 and found it didn’t run very good, partially due to the unsupported motherboard.

Overall, I liked Vista. It’s not amazing but if I had a better PC with up to date hardware, I’d still be running it now. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s been made out to be by the media and public in general. It’s my opinion that Vista got a bad reputation for many little reasons mostly out of Microsoft’s control. Mainly because of driver and software incompatibilities. Of course, since I didn’t get around to installing it until it was nearly two years old I missed out on many of the problems that likely influenced people’s decisions.

I’m looking forward to checking out the Windows 7 once I get the chance to install it.