I bought a 4GB Sony mp3 player. 40 quid less than an iPod of the same memory and no need for iTunes. when you plug the USB lead into the computer the player appears as a removable drive. You can also synchronise from Windows Media Player which I find useful.

My elder daughter gave my younger one an iPod for Christmas a couple of years ago and she had endless trouble with iTunes. It seems it is geared up to downloading and she mostly wanted to transfer tracks from her own CD collection to listen to on the move. iTunes kept trying to synchronise tunes she didn't want and wouldn't synchronise those she did want. In the end she gave up and bought a [non-Apple] mp3 player.

I was told that you can set iPods to be treated as external drives so you can drag and drop tunes, but this feature is not available on the shuffle which is the one my daughter was given.

I found that having to leave the computer on to charge mine a bit of a pain, but I have just found a charger with a USB socket to plug directly into the mains so you can charge independently of the computer. Much better.