Oh. I have absolutely no experience with either an iPod or FireWire on a PC.

Unfortunately, neither had I, until this past weekend. My dad's ipod shipped last Thursday, and since he was down he asked me for help installing a firewire card that he had just gotten. I was afraid, because his Dell runs WinME, which is horrible. Well, turns out that it caused all kinds of problems for us. I'll detail them in case any of you go through it, because looking around the web, some other folk have as well.

So we install the card. Turn on the computer. The add new hardware screen comes up. We start installing drivers. UH OH! It can't find a file. It can't find another file. And another. About 10 in total. We just tell it to skip them all and install it anyway. So everything finishes and the system page shows that the computer thinks the card is some sort of network adapter. We try uninstalling several times and repeating, but it's too late. The computer won't think the card is anything else.

After MUCH frustration, a return and replacement of the card, experiencing the same problems again (because we couldn't find the files it wanted), we finally tried the option of "picking the device from a list". We selected 1394 OHCI or something, and everything worked. It even foud the files it wanted.

I guess ME just hates firewire cards or something, because it had a hell of a lot of difficulty with it. Oh well.