mp3 player for the gym

[reevesy]

hi all,
quite suprisingly my technophobe missus is dropping major hints about a suitable player for the gym which will give about a hour/hour and a halfs worth of music.
i originally was looking at the 512 or 1 gb i pod shuffle and have also looked at a couple of reccomendations on here,trouble is a lot of them (incl.i pods) dont seem to mention compatibility with win 98?.
anyway something small,easy to use and take a bit of shaking about in the gym and south of the 100 quid mark would be ideal.any pointers?
cheers in advance .

iPod shuffle is perfect, but you need a Mac or Win XP or Win2000 for iTunes. I was never really happy with a hard disk ipod in the gym. But I'm pretty sure there's other software that understands the shuffle; ask Google. You also need USB2, which is unlikely on a W98 machine.

[LFC_SL]

win 98?! could you afford an upgrade? have Microsoft stopped security updates for '98 yet?

If you can't you would need a flash player that doesn't need software - just drag and drop. Thats basically those cheap ones made by companies no ones heard of. Do you still use USB, not USB2? That may hinder you, but upgrading to USB2 is cheap. You need to buy a PCMCIA card like:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...9505&doy=28m5D
£30 is about the cost, try pricerunner.co.uk to compare prices

[reevesy]

thanks for the replies,have only just got on line.
i have got one usb 2 port as i upgraded the motherboard (dont know if it actually usb 2 speed though).
is i tunes the preffered way to get your music transfered or can you drag and drop?
have thought about upgrading but dont know if its worth the outlay as 98 does everthing i need to do at the mo and i've got loads of software for various bits and bobs especially all things media.

[LFC_SL]

If you have any of the iPod line, you can use iTunes. There are 3rd party programs for iPod line but iTunes is a doddle to use - it can be set to sync with your player + auto transfer new songs when ur player is connected.

Depends on software really. iTunes is so good that you won't mind not having drag & drop.

Bear in mind there are other MP3 player makers out there - not just Apple

[reevesy]

any pointers?