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Is iTunes for Windows this bad for anyone else?

J

JulianL

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 2, 2010
1,728
740
London, UK
I'm pretty new to the Apple world, my first device was my iPad in April and now an iPhone 4 on launch day. I'd read a lot about people not thinking much of iTunes on Windows but I'd never expected it to be this bad! I've been using Microsoft Windows ever since Windows 95 and I now use Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. iTunes is the only app I have run since Windows 2000, i.e. in the last decade, where it fairly regularly locks up my PC so badly that I need to push the hardware reset button in order to recover the system. It just did it to me again a few minutes ago.

Even when it's running normally it seems amazingly slow in some operations, in particular if I go to the applications tab to see my downloaded applications then it shows all the apps but without their icons and at that point iTunes freezes until it has loaded up all the app icons which takes at least 60 seconds.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling all Apple components twice now and the lockups still happen.

I am not running an old or slow machine, in fact for normal office stuff like running Firefox or Microsoft Offfice my PC could be described as mind-bendingly fast; striped fast SSD drives for the system disc means that something like Firefox, which used to take about 45 seconds for a cold start on my previous system 2-year old system that had mere 10K Raptors for the C drive, now takes under 3 seconds to launch from cold (admittedly some of that improvement is probably due to "windows rot" on my old system vs a fresh install of Windows on my new system).

Do other people get total PC lockups from iTunes (and this is without the complication of and devices plugged in at the time)? How about the lengthy freeze while application icons load?

- Julian
 
yeh agreed sounds normal for iTunes, I am forever having it freeze up on me under windows 7, not as bad as you I normally just have to do a quick task manager force close but never had anything as major as having to hard reboot pc
 
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Yeah that's iTunes for you. It doesn't matter if you have an old pentium 4 pc or a brand new i5 or i7, iTunes will still perform like ****
 
Yeah, iTunes on Windows stinks rather bad. In fact I think that of all Apple software for Windows.

My experience on OS/X with iTunes has been a good one. I haven't had any problems whatsoever with it on my iMac.
 
They probably do it on purpose. I also have problems with iTunes on windows, and now I think my next computer will be a mac.
 
I am running Windows 7 - 32bit and previously ran Vista - 32bit and have NEVER had iTunes freeze. In fact i have yet to have either operating system freeze on me. I use limewire, itunes various media players, Windows media center and play the occassional game and never have had a problem.
 
It's not that bad for me, but it's to the point where i just open up task manager when i open iTunes, because i always have to use it to close it. I was hoping upgrading my computer specs would help, but it's not sounding likely.

EDIT: the previous poster gave me a little hope. Here's to hoping an OC'd i5 will do the job
 
On my dad's Windows 7 computer iTunes seems to work fine. On my old Windows Vista laptop it was slow and always freezing up. On my Mac, it works perfectly. I think it depends on your computer setup.
 
Yeah, iTunes is garbage. I installed it in order to jailbreak the phone, did the jailbreak and then removed it and all the other useless trash it slopped onto the hard drive. Apple has huge balls to criticize anyone else's software for any reason, ever, when they put out crap like iTunes and Safari with a straight face.
 
Yeah it has always acted that slow on windows for me as well. That is one of the big reasons I switched to mac. Now it runs wonderfully. Never lags at all. Its a beautiful thing when everything works as it should.
 
It's slow and bloated, but it shouldn't be causing hard locks. Something is not right. Either your iTunes install is broken, your Windows install is broken, or something about your combination of hardware isn't playing well.
 
It might be a bit slow to start on my Windows Vista, but it never crashes like that on me. I also used iTunes on XP Professional and Home edition in the past and it always worked just fine.
 
iTunes works fine on my Win7 desktop. It is however, significantly slower on it than on my MacBook.
 
The only part of itunes that isn't slow is my music library list. Other than that it's horrible. Particularly trying to individually trying to scroll and select certain apps to sync with my phone.

Don't get me started on the itunes store..... WOW...... I haven't tried out Ping, but I don't plan to either.

Like a previous poster said. Itunes is the only thing that makes my computer seem slow.
 
It's a little slow and clunky at times for me (on Win7 Pro 64) but nothing near that bad. I mostly notice it during a sync. It tends to freeze up for few seconds sporadically until the sync completes.
 
I'm running itunes64 on win7 pro x64, and it doesn't run as bad as what you describe

but the only problem I have is that when changing between content (eg from the apps tab to the music tab) itunes will freeze but, a quick work around is to minimize the program and then maximise it (do this by clicking on its symbol in the taskbar)
 
Thanks everyone. My conclusion from all this is that the issue with it taking forever to load up the icons when I look at the apps section of my library is par for the course and I need to live with it and hope that at some point Apple speed things up in a future release. My other conclusion is that my total lockups are more unique to me and probably due to some issue in my setup.

I have also wondered sometimes whether Apple deliberately cripple the Windows version, or at least knowingly put almost zero resources into improving it, in the hope that some users will move to Mac. I won't be one of those users though because (I say this with some trepidation on a Mac forum) I much prefer the Windows user interface so I refuse to compromise the other 98% of my work just to get iTunes running reliably. Absolutely no other app gives me the slightest bit of instability in Windows.

My suspicion regarding my lockups is that it's something in the USB driver not liking something else in my USB setup because Windows is a pretty modern operating system based on Windows 2000 (a server OS) so I don't think that any of the user level code, i.e. iTunes itself, is likely to be able to take the whole system down. It must be something nasty down in the device driver (kernel) layer. My mobo does have USB3 ports and I installed the USB3 driver so, given this is quite young technology, maybe that's messed something up. I might look for updates there or uninstall them completely since I have no USB3 devices.

- Julian
 
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