“I’ve been playing with a new iPod with video, the Apple Universal Dock, and the new Apple Remote for the past week, and I have two observations,” Paul Thurrott writes for WinInfo.

“First, despite years of experience with portable video, I’m super impressed with both the iPod video and the video formats (MPEG-4 and H.264) that it utilizes; even at 320 x 240 (or 480 x 270, as I’ve encoded my widescreen videos in), these movies look great blasted out to a large TV set, albeit with sub-DVD-style artifacts here and there,” Thurrott explains.

“Second, I’m suddenly hooked on the TV show “Lost.” I purchased the show’s premiere episode via iTunes to test the iPod, and now my wife and I are several episodes in and there’s no turning back. My TV watching habits tend toward horror movies, history and travel shows, and comedies like ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy,’ and I find most network TV to be reprehensible and unintelligent. But ‘Lost’ is just good stuff. I guess TV is like anything else: There’s good buried in there with the bad. The trick is to find it,” Thurrott writes.

Thurrott also discusses how he recently switched Internet providers and now can’t get his network-attached Dell laser printer to work properly, “the weirdest thing happened on my main desktop PC: After a few days of printing fine over the new network, it now refuses to print to the Dell, and crashes any application that tries to print (Word, Outlook, StarOffice, whatever). Then, Word just started crashing all the time, and let’s face it: I use Word all day, every day, and it never, ever crashes. So I switched the default printer to the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, and .. voila. No more crashes. That is just unbelievable. Days later, I still haven’t solved this issue. What a mess.”

Sounds like all is still “working normally” in Windows-land here.

Advertisement: The New iPod with Video.  The ultimate music + video experience on the go.  From $299.  Free shipping.

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