itunes: good but clunky

So, I finally broke down and loaded itunes on my PC. I have to say I am impressed with its functionality. It took 5 hours to convert my meagre 754 songs from mp3, wmv, etc to whatever the strange Apple format is - which seems to take up less space. It even lets you not delete the wretched wmv files, good for the OCD among us with seemingly unlimited drive space (I just bought an external 300 GB drive, so I am in disk-space heaven, and use it for back-up and my music - once I get more music, I'll buy another one to back it up to).
One nice feature - "show duplicates", but I have not figured out how to make it do it as a full duplicate - for example I have several remixes of songs that have the same title. I guess I could somehow make a search on that, but well, I am not that slick yet.
Anyway, it's good, much better than Windows Media Player. But slow to respond - it does everything on the fly, so if you search for "Limp Bizkit", you type L, and it gets all the L files, then you type i and it does all the Li files, etc., on the fly and clunky. Maybe it's my 3 yr old PC. Maybe it's the external drive, which is FireWire.