The laptop that I use to run iTunes into the stereo, when I'm not traveling with it, is pretty old and slow, and causes me much grief. I've done everything I can to the hardware to make it faster, but there's only so much you can do to a laptop (adding more memory is about it). It runs XP, with nearly everything but the essentials stripped-away.

I tried replacing it with a faster machine earlier this year, but the new one couldn't manage to play any songs in iTunes without dropping out every four or five seconds. I blamed Vista and the built-in WiFi, then returned it to Dell.

I'd read some good reviews of Windows 7, lately, and I thought the laptop would benefit from it: supposedly faster than Vista, smarter than XP, etc.. And I needed a Weven system to test my software on. So I bought a copy, and installed it on the laptop. Then I installed iTunes, imported the library and told it to play some Bob Marley while I cooked dinner. Immediately, however, I started hearing the same dropouts and skips that I got with the replacement laptop.

Trying to figure out what was going on lead me into the world of DPC latency. And it turns out the problem was the WiFi driver - which was written for XP, and has no Windows 7 version. Something about the way it was written absolutely kills the overall system performance - and I suspect something similar was happening to the replacement laptop. Bottom line: I needed to get rid of the WiFi card, in order to make Windows 7 work. Tall order...

One choice was a wireless bridge, which is basically a standalone WiFi receiver with a wired ethernet connection coming out - so it communicates with the WiFi router wirelessly, but looks like a plain wired connection to the computer. But Office Max didn't have one of them in stock. Another choice was a WiFi card with a Windows 7 driver - Office Max didn't have one of them, either. They did have some powerline networking stuff, though, and there's no WiFi needed there, either - it also looks like a plain wired connection to the computer. Even better, the powerline receiver offers four ethernet ports, so I can, in theory, plug in that Netflix streamer box Mrs. C has been talking about getting, too. The wireless bridges only have one port.

But, the powerline stuff I bought is pretty slow. It's fast enough to handle iTunes, but it's probably not going to be fast enough to handle high-quality streaming video. So, I've ordered a faster kit, which will be here tomorrow. If it can get into the 20Mbps range, I'll be happy (that's 1/10th of the the advertised speed, b.t.w.). If not, I'll return it and try the wireless bridge option. And if that doesn't work out, I'll call an electrician and see what it costs to string an ethernet cable across the house (and down a floor).

Windows 7: opening up a whole new world of exciting and expensive technical challenges !