I was very excited to try the beta release of the next version of Windows. The install went smoothly and I was soon greeted by the pretty new taskbar of Windows 7

I was very impressed with all the little UI touches that Microsoft has made to the operating system, like the ability to snap windows out of maximized mode by dragging them, and simple keystrokes for minimizing windows, for example.

But the reason I am beginning to feel a severe panic attack coming on right now – is that MEDIA PLAYER HAS BEEN MUTILATING MY MUSIC COLLECTION!

There is a warning on the Windows 7 Beta download site, recommending to backup all vital files before installing the operating system on your PC. I wasn’t too worried by this, as all my music was backed up on my linux server in the wardrobe. A free Microsoft product called SyncToy syncs all my music over the network every night at 3am.

I was pleased that iTunes was running smoothly on the beta OS – at first.

I wished to watch one of my movies on the Xbox360, and to stream it over the network I had to add my media library to Windows Media Player. This was my downfall it seems, as there was a bug in this new version of Media Player, which would cause some audio files to have the first few seconds cut off from them – permanently!

After a couple of days, I began to notice some songs would skip the intro, or start abruptly, and just thought it was a problem with iTunes. However, after playing the files in Windows Media Player and Winamp, the problem remained. Thank God I had all my music backed up, I thought – on the linux server, and my iPod. But – damn! Of course all this time iTunes had been syncing the broken mp3s to my iPod, so they were now broken too.

By this time, Microsoft had released a patch in Windows Update which fixed the bug, but not after several of my digital albums had been circumcised ( I still don’t know how many, I am trying to find the SyncToy log files)

Deciding to find all my broken music and replace it with the backups in the morning, I went to bed – just as my younger brother decides to boot back into Windows XP and start playing Battlefield 2. Now back in XP, the scheduled SyncToy task  was just waiting to kick in at 3am. In the morning, all broken mp3s in my music collection were also broken on my backup, as SyncToy did what it was supposed to.

Now thoroughly angry at Microsoft and myself, I decide this would make a painfully comical blog post, but it has only made me feel worse.