A little bit of Microsoft/Apple harmony has smoothed my home network. I was looking for a way to stream music off my laptop to my hifi and Apple’s dinky Airport Express seemed to fit the bill (thanks to Goofbay for a last-minute smash’n'grab on a second-hand unit). The other part of the problem was keeping the Vista laptop music folder in sync with my other PC, a desktop running Windows XP, and for this I use an MS ‘power toy’ called SyncToy 2.0, which I only stumbled upon: it seems to be almost a secret, but it’s pretty useful and it’s free. It doesn’t have any size limitations like the free version of Dropbox or MS’s Live Mesh, and it also doesn’t upload anything to the web, which in the case of music files would take ages and adds unnecessary complications and security issues. In short, it does what I need and no more.
So music gets synced courtesy of MS, then streamed by way of Apple. Everyone’s happy.