Vista suddenly noticably unstable

Normally I'm the one answering the questions but this time I thought maybe you guys could help ME out! Just recently my computer has just taken a nose dive in stability and performance. Things are acting weird such as my audio in iTunes freezing and looping until I restarted the computer. Other things are just overal slowness and skipping in music etc. I have completely scrubbed this computer clean (not a reformat) but spyware scans, disk cleanup, registry scans, defragmentation, and just about everything else that could be imagined. I HAVE NOT installed or uninstalled any sort of driver for anything or deleted any crucial files etc. Like I said this issue comes just completely spur of the moment. Does anyone have any idea what I can do? All of my hardware is functioning correctly as well. I just need some guidance. Thanks!

 

Monitor CPU utilization in task manager. Is HDD being thrashed ?

 

CPU usage is fluctuating within a normal low range, my HD appears to be VERY active but I did just re-index the drive in hopes perhaps that would do something to the performance.

 

You could try disabling superfetch, indexing etc. or do a system restore. Is the CPU usage low when the music skips and all ?

 

Has Windows recently any updates?

 

Ya, the CPU usage is low when it skips and everything else is normal. I will go ahead and disable those services as you suggested! To the guy wondering about Windows Updates, yes I actually installed a batch just the other day. I don't know if these issues i'm having can be attributed to it or not but I guess that remains to be seen..........

 

My experiences with Windows updates have shown that it is not uncommon for updates to fix one thing and unintentionally break something else. You can remove those updates and install them again, one by one, to find the culprit.

 

You should probably try running chkdsk with a full surface scan. If by chance you were developing bad sectors on the drive, it could cause symptoms like that as it repeatedly tried to read data.

That's probably not actually your problem, but you'd be remiss not to check it.

 

Alright I will go ahead and run that once I'm done on battery.

 

The CHKDSK went just fine, no errors recorded.

 

Do you have problems outside of iTunes too?
Does music play alright in WMP?
You did a virus scan too, right?

In Task Manager, Performance tab, click the Resource Monitor button and you can see which processes have been using the most disk and CPU over a period of some time.

Also, what audio driver do you have and when was it last updated (Device Manager)?

 

I will check on all of that tomorrow morning and get back to you!