Dear All

I have an Acer Aspire 1640Z laptop operating XP Home Edition SP2. It has 2 40GB hard drives, one of which is 90% full, the other half, and has 1.7Ghz.

I've had it for exactly a year, without any operating problems. About a week ago, i noticed a marked (perhaps 40-50%) slowdown in most operations (opening/closing programs) but especially in itunes. When i play a song, it skips and drags the sound out as iiiiiifffff sssttrrreeettcccchhiiiiinnnngggg eevveerryyyy wwwoooorrrddd (sorry thats the best way to describe it), rendering it unusable. Re-installing Itunes is to no effect.

I posted this here because I assumed it was a hardware problem (it is having such a big impact on my machine) - if this is not the case feel free to move the thread - it was genuinely posted in the wrong place out of lack of knowledge rather than laziness.

If anyone can help that would be hugely appreciated. I'm completely in the dark.

Ok so now I see that the problem is when Itunes plays songs, or for that matter any other program plays media, the CPU usage spikes dramatically to over 90%, regularly, for roughly 30 seconds in each minute. This also occurs when opening programs etc. I have purged my laptop of lots of software, defragged, changed startup entries etc, i.e. all the perfomance-related things you can do, but the spiking is still a problem.