What’s happening? Unfortunately, that’s a question I ask (well, okay, I think it) a few times a week as my laptop seems to go into “zombie mode” — some background service or process suddenly decides it needs to jack up its CPU usage, and I’m left sitting and twiddling my thumbs waiting for a simple Microsoft Word document to open up. Lately this has been happening to me because of some problem with my iTunes Outlook synchronization process, which after upgrading to the latest version of iTunes suddenly decided that it never finishes — it continues to take up to 40 percent CPU utilization even after the synchronization is done. Such problems with PCs and applications can occur for hundreds (or thousands) of different reasons and with different causes.
