iTunes slow loading on Windows 7 x64

Question

my pc has windows 7 ultimate 64 bits installed and 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, working with an Athlon II X3 435 (2.9Ghz) processor. When I start iTunes, it takes 6-7 seconds to load, and that's too much.

I don't use Apple devices (iPhone, iPad etc.) and I don't use iTunes Store

Is there a way to disable unnecessary features to speed up loading time? What I need is just Music and Movies library for playing content from my hard disk.

Solution 1

Try using the 64-bit version of iTunes (you're most likely running the 32-bit version):

  iTunes 10.2.2 for Windows (64 bit)
  http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1047

Over the past decade, Apple's iTunes has slowly developed into a very resource-heavy application, and by default Apple provides the 32-bit version of their product regardless of whether you're using a 32-bit or 64-bit Operating System.

I find that the 64-bit version of iTunes seems to work more efficiently on 64-bit Operating Systems like the one you're using.

Once you've downloaded and installed the 64-bit version of iTunes, be sure to check for updates as soon as you can so that you can get this updated as well (the updates will also bring in the 64-bit versions).

Solution 2

You can not remove any features to make it boot up faster, 7 seconds is the average startup time for itunes, unless you're running it on an SSD.

7 seconds isn't an amazingly long time.

Solution 3

Using Resource Monitor I noticed that iTunes was spending up to a minute reading from c:\Users\Your Username\iTunes\Temp File *.tmp so I deleted all those temp files, plus the temp directory in c:\Users\Your Username\iTunes\temp (that was 130MB on my machine)

Now iTunes starts almost instantly and uses almost no CPU time while running.

I suspect iTunes creates these temp files upgrading the iTunes library during upgrades, and often gets stuck in a loop reading it.

iTunes is very disk heavy program. On my system it's always the most disk intensive app when it's running. I always find it handy to use Resource Monitor to analyse what a slow program is doing. Nine times out of ten it's thrashing the disk.

Comments

[Chris_K]

I would do cartwheels in the streets if iTunes loaded in 7 seconds on my x64 win7 machine!

[Randolf Richardson]

@Chris_K: What would you do for VLC Media Player (it normally loads in less than 2-3 seconds for me)? videolan.org/vlc