A friend of mine, a Mac user, has emplored me to download and use iTunes on my Win2K PC. I don't doubt the usefulness of iTunes for music downloads but I've reservations about its compatibility with my operating system and with certain of my drivers and applications. Does iTunes have a clean bill of health in that regard, when applied to Windows machines?

A couple of things in particular concern me. I'm given to understand that iTunes auitomatically embodies Microsoft.Net Redistr. If that's the case, then my graphics driver will definitely be incompatible, as my graphics driver is one that's specifically designed to perform without Microsoft.Net.

The other concern is Quicktime, which I gather is also installed by iTunes by default and which is necessary for certain video streaming. I thought I read some time ago of some dire problems with Quicktime on Windows machines. Were these unfounded?

I've a perfectly good Windows Media Player, incidentally, and wouldn't want that to be screwed up in any way.

Any idea of the total size of iTunes? Is it several hundred MB?

I've never seen Itunes request that .NET be installed....I'll check the program today if I can but I not believe that it's a .NET app

As far as Quicktime goes you can get Itunes without Quicktime. Previously I had to hack quicktime out myself but when I downloaded Itunes 7 I believe I was able to just download Itunes (the download was ALOT smaller as well without the Quicktime program).

Quicktime with Windows has always been dicy but usually only when your dealing with older quicktime programs that require their version of quicktime to be installed. Other than that I haven't had any issue with Quicktime (unless you count when I install Quicktime Alternative and it complains about the real Quicktime).



LOL. If you say so.


Nah, IIRC Itunes is like 30mb or something like that.

I personally just use Winamp. The latest ver of Winamp includes an IPOD plugin although I still use the previous Itunes pluging that I used before Winamp included it.

I've tried using iTunes, basically since I don't own an iPod I have no reason to use it so I uninstalled the app.

I do however use just the Quicktime Media Player which you can d/l by itself without iTunes.

I do however prefer to use Windows Media Player and the new version that comes with Vista seems pretty nice too.

I basically just d/l the Cole2k Advanced CODEC Pack and this pretty much supports everything I need including LOSSLESS decoding like FLAC and APE