I'm helping my girlfriend look for an MP3 player. She runs Windows XP. I've been researching it here, and there for a while, and it seems like after iPods, and Zunes there's a really weird dropoff in quality, and selection. She had a Creative player for a little less than a year before it started having problems, and according to just about every review on the internet Creative will not honor your warranty for anything. There's a lot of various brands pitching pretty much the same thing, but 90% of the selection out there seems to be 2-8 gig models (What are you gonna do with a 2 gig video player? Watch half a movie?).

I'm just curious what people are actually using.

And no dead baby jokes. Children are out most precious natural resource.

save the money and just get an ipod.

I say "save the money" cause if you buy just any other mp3 player, when it breaks in a year, you will then have to buy an ipod

My iPod rules. No question. But I'm also running OSX. When I got it 2 years ago there were a lot of issues with people running Windows not being able to sync their iPods, etc. Is this something that's been resolved, or at least gotten better?

I only use windows.
as long as you synch to the same computer and turn off the "auto library synch" option, you should be good to go.

I lose my library every now and again, but other than that it's fine.

From what I understand, it has gotten a lot better, but this is what I'm hearing from friends as I'm also on OSX with my ipod.

A lot of the kinks seem to be worked out and more often than not itunes is running a lot smoother on other systems and the ipod isn't having as much trouble, either.

I have a 30gig video ipod that goes absolutely everywhere with me.

i had one for 5 days before it was stolen. that was the end of that experiment.

that sucks

I'm still waiting on the iPod haters to show up.

most of the time, I blame FISM's rampant alcoholism for things like that.

i blame people that arent me

I have a 60GB Creative Zen Vision W. I've had it almost 2 years now. Love the thing. Have my whole music collection, a dozen or so full length movies and a ton of tv episodes including every season of The Office. I've been lucky enough to never have dropped it so don't know how it would take that but the thing seems to be built like a tank. I love the fact that the battery is removable. I don't usually carry it around with me cause it is a little bulky. Mostly just use it in my car or when im waiting somewhere and want to watch a movie or something.

Worst problem i've ever had is every once in a while especially when the battery gets real low I'll go to change the track and it'll freeze. I just pull the battery and restart it and it has to "rebuild" the library which takes a good half hour since i have the thing almost full. It's only done that i think 3 times since ive had it though so its just a minor inconvenience.

The buttons are kind of small and clumsy and especially hard to use while driveing. They supposedly have a new one coming out thats touchscreen so i'll more than likely be getting that when this one dies.

how long do ipods last? i like creative but don't want to get one just have it shit out on me in two years.

i love/hate my ipod... all the pre-set equalizers on it sucks and every month or so it freezes... other than that I have no complaints what so ever

if i buy an ipod, can i transfer all of my mp3zzzzz on my pc to it? or does it have to come from itunes? i'd rather get an mp3 player if that was the case.

I dropped my Toshiba Gigabeat yesterday and the back broke off. So I'm going to purchase a larger LCD and build a custom case for the thing. I am likely going to have this mp3 player until I die.

I think most quality mp3 players have some sort of ancillary software that you need to put your music onto it.

As far as how iTunes works, yes you need it to put music on your iPod, BUT you don't need to have a massive iTunes library with all your MP3s in it. When you load iTunes your iPod will show as a device. Just drag your files from anywhere into the iPod device icon and it imports it simple as that. It's surprisingly more intuitive than you'd think.