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From: Salvador Freemanson on 24 Jan 2008 03:13
A year ago my employer made a contribution for me to get a new laptop.
Until then I had always used second-hand, cast-offs, etc.

So I've been using a shiny new Toshiba Satellite dual core machine with
XP, 1 GB ram, for the last year.


I would have thought dual core was meant for multiple tasks. But running
Word, Firefox, PDF reader, seems to be about the limit. If I also run a
virus scan, the whole thing freezes.

Is there any point to dual core, except for games players and CAD users
- other than raising the price and the power consumption.
From: Dan on 24 Jan 2008 14:07
System performance is dependant on many factors. What dual core cpu are you
using? Virus scans are notorious for being system hogs. Problem could be
insufficient ram or in your case, probably hard drive speed. Is it a
4200-5400-7200rpm drive? HD speed is usually overlooked when purchasing a
laptop, but often results is a system being slow.

"Salvador Freemanson" <spam(a)gohome.com> wrote in message
news:479848c5$0$31760$426a74cc(a)news.free.fr...
>A year ago my employer made a contribution for me to get a new laptop.
>Until then I had always used second-hand, cast-offs, etc.
>
> So I've been using a shiny new Toshiba Satellite dual core machine with
> XP, 1 GB ram, for the last year.
>
>
> I would have thought dual core was meant for multiple tasks. But running
> Word, Firefox, PDF reader, seems to be about the limit. If I also run a
> virus scan, the whole thing freezes.
>
> Is there any point to dual core, except for games players and CAD users -
> other than raising the price and the power consumption.


From: Dave Martindale on 24 Jan 2008 20:57
Salvador Freemanson <spam(a)gohome.com> writes:

>I would have thought dual core was meant for multiple tasks. But running
>Word, Firefox, PDF reader, seems to be about the limit. If I also run a
>virus scan, the whole thing freezes.

>Is there any point to dual core, except for games players and CAD users
> - other than raising the price and the power consumption.

Dual core gives you two copies of *one* system resource - the CPU. It's
wonderful if you're doing two CPU-intensive things (e.g. compiles) since
both can run at near full speed, rather than each getting half of one
CPU. When running Windows, it's also useful to have one CPU idle most
of the time so you get quick response to keyboard and mouse input even
when one CPU is busy running a CPU-heavy application. (To some extent,
this is the fault of the Windows scheduler not being willing to
interrupt an application when an interactive process becomes ready;
Linux is more responsive on a single-core machine. But since most
people run Windows, having a "spare" core is useful to most people).

On the other hand, if you run a virus scan, you're probably saturating
the disk, and nothing els can get much done if it requires disk I/O.
You'll probably find that the machine works fine for a telnet or SSH
login to some remote machine (involves CPU and graphics but no disk
I/O), for example. If you attach an external USB disk, you may also
find that you can do useful work with applications on the one disk while
the other disk is running a virus scan.

But if you've got only one disk, and one process hogging all the disk
bandwidth, any number of additional CPU cores will not help you.

Dave
From: Barry Watzman on 24 Jan 2008 22:15
Yes; in a typical PC running Windows, there are 50+ tasks running at any
given time (hit ctrl-alt-delete and click on the "processes" tab .....).
XP can use both cores. However, if you are short on memory, or if you
saturate the disk I/O capability, you will still have performance
problems. And in a typical laptop (with a 5,400 rpm relatively slow
laptop hard drive), a virus scan will EASILY saturate the disk system
pretty much all by itself.


Salvador Freemanson wrote:
> A year ago my employer made a contribution for me to get a new laptop.
> Until then I had always used second-hand, cast-offs, etc.
>
> So I've been using a shiny new Toshiba Satellite dual core machine with
> XP, 1 GB ram, for the last year.
>
>
> I would have thought dual core was meant for multiple tasks. But running
> Word, Firefox, PDF reader, seems to be about the limit. If I also run a
> virus scan, the whole thing freezes.
>
> Is there any point to dual core, except for games players and CAD users
> - other than raising the price and the power consumption.
From: SMS on 25 Jan 2008 10:09
Salvador Freemanson wrote:
> A year ago my employer made a contribution for me to get a new laptop.
> Until then I had always used second-hand, cast-offs, etc.
>
> So I've been using a shiny new Toshiba Satellite dual core machine with
> XP, 1 GB ram, for the last year.
>
>
> I would have thought dual core was meant for multiple tasks. But running
> Word, Firefox, PDF reader, seems to be about the limit. If I also run a
> virus scan, the whole thing freezes.
>
> Is there any point to dual core, except for games players and CAD users
> - other than raising the price and the power consumption.

One of the biggest reasons for dual core was to reduce the power
consumption.
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