Bad Apples In My PCs

[onedomino]

To accommodate an Apple Nano music player, I installed ITunes 7.6 on both laptops that I use: an older Dell D620 laptop and a new Dell M4300. Both machines had ran poorly all last week. Finally, I put some test software on the D620. ITunes installs three (!!) auto-start programs plus QuickTime. One program in particular, “ITunes Helper,” was acting like a digital terrorist inside both PCs. The D620 would only run for about five minutes before the Core2 processor spun up to 100 percent utilization and the machine locked up. The M4300 would last about 15 minutes because it has two physical processors, 2XCore2. But it also would reach total utilization of the processors and lock up. Both laptops have lots of physical memory and all Windows updates, including XP SP3. After uninstalling ITunes (and QuickTime) the PCs returned to normal.