About a week ago I was playing some music using Apple's iTunes when my Averatec laptop suddenly froze: Only the 5-second power button push could put the machine out of its misery. Although this was the first time iTunes froze on me that way, having Windows machines seize up like that has happened enough that I thought nothing of it. That is, until the odd behaviors started...

• A longer than usual boot time.
• Sporadic bursts of high cpu activity coupled with a disk I/O rates for no apparent reason.
• And worst of all, iTunes started stuttering on playback of any song regardless of other activity on the laptop.

Now you need to know that for some time I had been suspecting my laptop of running rather hotter than usual so my first suspicion was that the problem was heat related. One can of compressed air and a fresh dab of arctic silver to glue the heat-sink back to the AMD CPU later the high utilization outbursts and stutterng iTunes were still with me: Strike One

Googling for "windows iTunes stutter" yielded a bountiful harvest of hits, many of which ultimately derived from Apple's advice to modify Quicktime's Audio settings to use the "Safe mode (waveOut only)" option.
This was interesting because it did not eliminate the stuttering but rather it did seem to allow iTunes to recover from its stuttering bouts. I'd have to call this a "Foul Ball" and thus it counts as: Strike Two.

These excessive bursts of CPU activity coupled with high disk I/O triggering stutter behavior in iTunes naturally lead one to think about memory and paging. The paging statistics did not look out of the ordinary and certainly I wasn't suddenly running any more applications than usual. Still, $110 later I was the proud owner of a 1GB PC2700 SO DIMM and my laptop's memory capacity was doubled. Without further ado, Strike Three was called as nothing really changed.

Meanwhile I had downloaded some fine additional tools to introspect the machine's behavior. Tools such as

• Process Explorer to show me that the excessive CPU consumption was all due to hardware interrupts, further making me worry that my hardware was on the fritz.
• SpeedFan to measure the temperature of my CPU and hard drives to finally put that issue to bed.

So what did I do to finally rid myself of this problem? Simple, I picked a Windows Restore Point a day or so back before the crash, restored it, repaired the iTunes installation and things have been running fine since. Mind you, not knowing what was really going wrong bugs me as much as the next person but this environment is so complex anymore with so little hard data to go on that I can simply not afford to analyze it any further. As it is this little crash has set me back about $150.00 in parts, not to mention untold numbers of hours.
Hopefully someone out there will read this and save themselves all this trouble and simply restore to their last working configuration so they can once more enjoy their music the way it was meant to sound.