Running iTunes on a Netbook

[soloflight7]

Hello. I believe I'll be getting a netbook, and I was wondering about running iTunes on it with Windows 7. Should I use that or stick with WMP to use less resources? I have more music on iTunes than WMP, so I'm curious! Any tips would be appreciated.

Depends on how much music you have. I keep my iTunes on a separate hard drive connected to a desktop just to manage the iPod video and Touch. There's too much to load on my netbook. I use VLC to listen to music and play video on the netbook without putting music or video into iTunes. HTH

[ericinboston]

Originally Posted by soloflight7

Hello. I believe I'll be getting a netbook, and I was wondering about running iTunes on it with Windows 7. Should I use that or stick with WMP to use less resources? I have more music on iTunes than WMP, so I'm curious! Any tips would be appreciated.

I have a 2+ year old Dell Mini9 with 1GB ram and Windows XP...I run iTunes 9.x on it and store all my music on my external USB hard drive (since I don't have much room on my main drive).

Plays just fine. And remember that my machine is old...so the current netbooks have faster CPUs in case you are worrying about anything.

I am not a fan of WMP in any capacity.

-Eric

[ThisIsNot]

I wouldn't worry about iTunes consuming less resources than Windows Media Player. In fact, from my experience, they both consume about the same amount of processor speed and RAM when playing back music and standard definition videos. iTunes consumes about 30% of my 1.66GHz Atom N280 processor and about 200MB of RAM, same thing for Windows Media Player. CPU usage will jump up to 100% when playing back 720p (or higher) videos (simply because neither iTunes nor Windows Media Player support my hardware for video accelerated playback).

I have a 10,000+ song music library along with 30 standard definition movies, 19 different SDTV shows with over 31.66GB (2.4 days) worth of video, 12 audiobooks, about 24 apps for an iPhone (or iPod touch and iPad), and 10 different subscriptions to video podcasts all on a USB 2.0 1TB hard drive hooked up to my netbook. Everything runs just fine. It might take a little longer to start iTunes than on my 8-core desktop with 8GB of RAM but things are still rather smooth.

[ericinboston]

Also, if you want something REALLY LIGHTWEIGHT...grab Winamp (just get the light version: http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/...lite_en-us.exe )...I've been using it for 15+ years...the playlists are not as strong at iTunes but if you just wanna drag and drop some mp3s into it, it rocks...extremely light on the RAM and CPU usage compared to anything else.

I love iTunes' Playlist power...but hate iTunes' system drain.

-Eric

[soloflight7]

Thank you all very much for the kind and informative input, especially the last contributor. I appreciate the helpfulness of this forum. Once I get my Asus I'll drop a line here. Thanks again!