I'll state right upfront that I'm not the most educated person when it comes to computers, so my way of explaining the problem may seem less coherent than others on this forum.

A short while ago I was ripping music into Itunes when the program froze, and after letting it sit for a while I did the knee-jerk CTRL/ALT/DEL magic and got the computer running again. The problem is, that after this happened my rip speeds went from 10X-14X to 2X-4X. It also made watching DVDs on my computer nearly impossible due to constant skipping and jerking around. Whenever I attempt to do anything with that drive now and I look at the processes of the computer it says that I'm using 90-100% of my computer power and everything else I'm trying to do at that time on the machine is slowed down to a crawl.

Basically it almost feels like it's trying to work too hard or something similar (I don't know how to explain that in a more sophisticated way). I've uninstalled and reinstalled Itunes to make sure it wasn't a software problem, but it does the same thing with Windows Media Player or the DVD playing software.

The funny thing is....this isn't the first time this has happened. About a year ago the drive did the exact same thing after I had to cancel when it froze during a music rip. Shortly after though one of my hard drives burned out and I ended up completely wiping the hard drive I use currently and gave it a clean slate. Upon doing this, the disc drive worked perfectly, and did so until recently. So, I can't really say it's hardware OR software problem, but I really have no direction on where to approach fixing this problem.

Any help at all would be extremely appreciated. Thank you for spending the time reading and thinking about this.

In the Task Manager what process is using the CPU at 90%?

You could try Uninstalling the drive from the Device Manager then reboot the computer.

This will force Windows to reinstall the drivers.

Then check the Task Manager again. Is there still a process running 90%?

If so what is it?

If this does not help you might consider getting a new DVD/CD drive.

Sorry for the delay in response. I performed the suggested action of uninstalling the drive to no success, sadly. While I want it to simply be a hardware problem that I could go out and fix with a bit of cash, I suspect it may be something other than that simply because it's done the exact same thing before, and after having to erase the memory, it was perfectly fine (until recently).

As for what task is causing usage numbers in the 90-100% range, it's whatever program is using the drive at the time, be it Itunes, Windows Media Player, or anything else.

Thanks for your time and suggestions.