Question : Problem: Household with Mom, son, and daughters, with iphones, ipods, and itouches can it work together?

I have a household customer, with iphones, itouch, and an ipod.  

The customer has a Windows XP Laptop, using one windows logon "owner", and two email accounts into the latest version of ITunes.  Mom has an iphone and an ipod.  She wants songs to transfer only on the ipod, not to the iphone.  She has movies she wants on the iphone.  She dropped her iphone and broke it, and went to the ATT store and got a new iphone.  We used a third party product to copy the existing movies on the old iphone, and imported them back into iTunes, where iTunes recognizes the movies, but will not download them, getting an error message that it's not allowed, I suspect it has something to do with DRM.  It was purchased under mom's email address.

During the purchasing process Mom at home tried to sync her contacts in her old broken IPhone with the PC (it still powered up, but ATT deactivated it).  Unfortunately she uses Outlook Express, and ITunes was set to sync with Microsoft Outlook 2003, and Microsoft Outlook 2003 was not configured for any email, so she lost all her contacts - they simply disappeared off the old iphone.

Daughter 1 has an iphone - movies and music do not get sent down at all.

Daughter 2 has an iTouch - one of those devices that looks like an iphone but does not have a phone.  She wants two movies she purchased under her email account, but those movies shouldn't go into Mom's iphone (which it doesn't).  

Son #1 has an ipod, he wants tunes from their library going to his ipod.  Some tunes are purchased, some tunes are ripped from their personal CD's.

What the customer wants:

Selected music to go to Mom's Ipod (but no tunes to her iphone) and the two daughter's  itouch and iphone, and son's ipod.

Mom's movies to go to Mom's iPhone, but not the ipod, mom only wants her Contacts to sync to her IPhone, she does not want her contacts going to the son's or daughter's iTouch or iPods.

Songs to Mom's Ipod, and Daughter 1 and Daugher 2's purchased movies signing on as the 2nd email user to go to each girl's itouch and another iphone respectively, and music to go to both Daughter's computer, with one single Windows logon, all running one common copy of ITunes for all three users.  Son #1 wants to continue sending music down to his ipod.  This all from a single logon, and the current running copy of ITunes.

The customer would like to know if this would be more simplified if she replaced the PC with a Macbook.

Answer : Problem: Household with Mom, son, and daughters, with iphones, ipods, and itouches can it work together?

Alternatively .. you can use the feature of  iTunes to have multiple Libraries on the same user account.  This saves you logging in and out on every users account just to update their ipods.

1. Make sure iTunes is NOT running .. then while holding down the SHIFT key .. open iTunes.
2. You will then have the option to open an existing Library or Create a new Library.
3. Create a NEW library for each of the 2 daughters and son and give them recognisable names.

Now each person can just open their own iTunes Library file and manage their video and music .. their way.

I recommend this free tool called Libra to help creating and managing these multiple Libraries
http://homepage.mac.com/sroy/libra/

Another advantage is that there is only 1 copy of the music folder on the PC but everyone can include or exclude whatever music and videos they wish from their own Library.