Windows slows to a crawl while d - loading

[Private Donut]

Recently my computer has been going very slow while utorrent is up and I'm downloading. For example, if I try to listen to music or watch a movie while downloading something it either doesn't work or it skips a lot, the video and/or audio looks and sounds like it is being stopped and started continuously.

Oddly, my internet connection is fine; what I mean is, I have no trouble going online, but the computer itself is slowed down. When I go to the task manager while utorrent is up my CPU usage resides around 40 –70%. I don't know if that's normal or not, but I doubt it is, I'm running on a 2.4 GHz quad core processor and 4 gigs of ram.

At first, I thought that it was zone alarm fighting with utorrent, but after shutting the firewall down the problem did not cease to exist.

I don't know when this problem started, or why but I know that it started recently. I used to get speeds of like 500kbps to 1mbps but around the time my computer started slowing down my downloads slowed down too nowadays I'm lucky to get 150kbps

Any help on this problem would be widely appreciated.

(I use peer guardian)

Edit:I've fixed the problem, it was zonealarm. apparently shutting it down while downloading isn't enough i had to uninstall it. after uninstalling zonealarm, everything went faster. I guess it is safe to say zonealarm isnt compatiable with utorrent.

Sorry for being such a noob feel free to remove this post scince it is resolved.

[Switeck]

Zone Alarm is incredibly poorly written software that is "incompatible" with far more than just uTorrent. Due to its own specific security holes, it may even make a computer LESS secure!