text: does itunes really slow down a laptops performance? if so, how significantly? are there any good alternatives to itunes that will not hog my laptop's memory? a program by definition requires ram/cpu threads. any program you choose will "slow" down your system and hog resources. i'm assuming you're reffering to the ituneshelper.exe process that runs while itunes is not active?  the great thing about mac programmers is that they know what they're doing. that process is designed to relinquish ram when it's needed. so while your system is idle, it's ram usage will increase, under load or stress it will drop it's consumption.  some alternatives to itunes are winamp, though it can be a bit of a resource hog too, windows media player (naturally), those two together might be able to occupy about 80% of itunes function 'out of the box'.  if you're music library is large, you'll probably want to stick with itunes, as it handles a large library better than wmp or winamp.