I use EAC to rip my cd's to WAV. In the compression options, I check the box that says to use an external compressor. My whole system slows down in the ripping/encoding process each time lame.exe starts up. By the way, I have --alt-preset standard in the additional command line box, and the lame version I have is the latest one (3.93.1 I think). I have an AMD XP1600 (1.4 ghz), so it seem like I should be able to handle the load. I've read through the FAQ and done tons of searching, but I've found no answers. Any suggestions? Or it supposed to be like this?

In EAC/EAC Options you can change extraction/compression priority to Idle/Normal/High

LAME tries to encode as fast as possible so it stresses your CPU to the max. If you lower the priority as described above, it will leave some 'room' for running other apps.