Tech Review

The problem:

I keep my music on an external drive, the Seagate FreeAgent. I use both iTunes and JRiver's excellent Media Center. Vista (and every other Windows, to be fair) assigns the drive a different letter every time I plug it in ("F:/," "G:/," etc.), depending on what else is attached to the computer. Since the software expects the music to be in the same place every time, the music players report that they can't find the music.

Solution:

Choose click and wait to be annoyed.

Open "Computer Management" and reassign the drive another letter. It works well. The drive will reappear with the new letter. First, right click on "Computer" (Microsoft got rid of the "My." Now that's innovation!). Choose "manage," say "yes" to the annoying Microsoft pop-up, click on "Disk Management," and you're smart enough to figure out the rest.

computer management.