How to crash your computer with iTunes

I've had my iPod for a week now, and yesterday I went into iTunes again to update my podcasts, check on my music, and see if I could find a couple more things to pull in for my iPod. Since I had only used up about half of the 8 GB capacity, I figured this would be no big deal.

I subscribed to two more podcasts, Movies You Should See and NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Then, I went ahead and told iTunes to "GET" a bunch of other episodes of some of the other podcasts I had subscribed to. This should fill up my iPod nicely, I reasoned, and I let the computer chug away at downloading and went to bed.

Well, sometime the next day, my wife yells at me from the living room, "What did you do to the computer?!" Turns out I had totally filled up our little 4-year old PC to its digital gills with data, and it had something like 140K left on the hard drive. Oops.

Well, being the technological brains in the family, she sits down and fixes the whole thing, moves stuff around, and generally gives me a mini-tutorial about how to use iTunes (and not make duplicates of all my podcasts and not accidentally delete all my music - two things I recently did).

So, since we're not quite ready to commit to a whole new computer yet (I think a beefy iMac is going to be the '08 family Christmas present), we're headed off to CostCo on Monday afternoon to get a big external media drive. The plan is to transfer all of our music and everything iTunes is pointing at over to our new drive (500 GB for $129 says the website). That should hold all the video, movies, music, podcasts and whatever we want. And plenty of room to grow (hopefully).