This.

There's simply very little if real benefit unless you have a very low end machine. Even a fairly mid-range gaming PC now tends to have a quadcore CPU and 6-8GB of RAM. 10 years ago I'd go on a witch hunt if I saw more than 50 or so process running on my PC. Now? I just checked and there are 95 processes running. I don't even bother closing web browsers, torrent programs etc anymore. Even so I don't think I've ever seen my system use more than about 7GB, and have no performance issues in any games I've played. You can see my sytsem in my sig, it's good but nowhere near top of the line.

I just got my new system, an i5 with 8 GB RAM for Christmas, well the parts at least, and came from a Pentium IV. Looks like I have to change my way of thinking now that I'm not in 2003 any more

I've never had issues with iTunes slowing my computer, and I'm on a 3-year-old Samsung netbook with 2GB RAM and a 1.6GHz processor. iTunes itself is slow, but I can play music while simultaneously playing R6: Raven Shield (old game, but still good) without any problems.

Never had an iPhone, but I used to use iPods a few years ago. Back then I did use iTunes (didn't have much choice when I first started) and did have problems with it during games. Worst was the iTunes updater minimizing my games. It got tiresome trying to kill all the iTunes related processes just to be safe before investing time in an online race event.

I later moved to a third party program to manage my iPods and never used iTunes again. Ultimately I dumped the iPods too, upgrading to better functionality with other equipment.

Run a Virtual PC and do ITunes inside of it...

I ran iTunes on my second desktop, but then I just caved and installed it on my gaming PC. Didn't experience any difference in performance at all. Sure is nice not having to boot a second machine every time I want some new music though...

-C-

If you take care of some startup services it installs ("Bonjour") or what was the name) it is only active when active.

I actually run it as music player in the background for some games. Not so bad. While I heartily dislike the company, the WMP Interface just kills me.

This is what I do!