iTunes Black Screen in Vista : A Lesson in Customer Service

Apple can launch all the smirky attack ads against PCs, but their latest upgrade of iTunes is making a lot of loyal PC/iTunes users more than a little miffed.

Here's how.  If you have iTunes on your computer, Apple will notify you when there is an upgrade.  Unless you want to have problems with your iPod, you will dutifully click on the notice and upgrade your current version.  That's what I did a few months ago.  Now, I'm not one of those frequent users of iTunes – mostly because I've uploaded over 4,000 songs and don't have a need for daily downloads of music.  But that's not the point. 

When I opened my iTunes 8.0, all I got was this black screen.  When I went to the iTunes site I couldn't find any help.  So I Googled the problem and found that I was not the only one with the problem.  Not only that, but it seems that the solution wasn't that easy to find.  It took a lot of searching to finally find one – and it wasn't from Apple!

The Solution

If you're using Windows Vista, you might get this black screen of death from your iTunes.  If that happens don't do what I did and reinstall and cause yourself grief and whatever you do DO NOT try to sync – it will mess up your iPod!  Do this instead.

•  Go to your Program Files/iTunes folder
• Find the iTunes.exe file (it's probably not called that in Vista.  Mine just says "iTunes" and has the iTunes favicon on it.
• Right click on that and go to Properties
• Then click on Compatibility
• Check the box that says Windows XP
• Also check the boxes that say disable visual themes and disable desktop composition
• Click Apply and Click OK
• Re-Launch iTunes

That should do the trick.

The Lesson

You can't tell me that Apple doesn't know about this!  I'm more than a little surprised that they've left this fix to the overall user community to fix. 

While I'm sure that many iTunes users are somewhat computer savvy, I know quite a few that would be completely crippled by this.  And if they went as far as messing up their iPod in the process – that makes for a lot of unhappy users — and not many downloads of iTunes – I'd imagine.

The moral of this story is to watch the internet for user problems, if you notice that people are having issues – YOU make sure you include the fix on your site and don't leave it up to the market to fix your mistake.