Core 2 Duo - can I tell the difference

Merrill P. L. Worthington wrote:
Being an average computer user and not a heavy gamer (only MS Flight Sim
2004 and soon X-Plane), will I be able to notice much of a difference
between my current Athlon 64 3700 (1gb CAS2 RAM) and 3800 machines (2gb
CAS2 RAM)?

I agree with Kony that most users don't benefit from cutting edge CPUs
these days.

I'm not trying to brag or anything, but I have access to the following
computers:
1) 200 Dual core Intel Xeon 3.6GHz
2) 180 Quad core Intel Xeons (not sure about these specs yet)
3) SGI Altix
4) Pentium 4 2.5GHz

(1) - (4) are part of my university's cluster, which will be upgraded
with 1600 new nodes soon.

5) AMD64 754-pin 3400+
6) AMD XP 2500+ (temporarily offline due to CPU malfunction)
7) Intel D 805 2x3.33GHz
8) Pentium 4 1.7GHz
9) Pentium 3 866MHz

(5) is my work PC at college and (6) - (9) are part of my home parallel
cluster.

Guess which PC I use for "average Joe" jobs? ;-)

The Pentium 3 :-)

Learn to use both Linux and Windows. I am still learning, but I can
accomplish many tasks in Linux with a single bash command that would
take me an hour of clicking with Windows.

And Fishface, turn off Autoplay completely. Google for it; don't just
turn it off in the Explorer properties tab.

Not only does Autoplay sometimes mess up your CD/DVD burning, some
protected audio CDs will crash your computer/load rootkits before you
click on a single item if you put your drives on autoplay.

I was also wondering when I might see benefit from the dual core. I get
annoying
waits when I insert a CD and when I click on a floppy in Windows Explorer
(the
system tries to extract an icon from every single file). I guess it's
mostly device
drivers tying up the system for me. Hate that...

How much RAM do you have in your system? I'm guessing not enough. Add a
gigabyte an I bet you'll see a huge improvement.

"Fishface" ? wrote...

I was also wondering when I might see benefit from the dual core. I get
annoying waits when I insert a CD and when I click on a floppy in Windows
Explorer (the system tries to extract an icon from every single file). I
guess it's mostly device drivers tying up the system for me. Hate that...

CPU upgrades will not help in any task where a more significant bottleneck
exists. You will still have to wait for CDs, DVDs, and floppies to spin up,
and will be limited by their transfer rates. If you don't have enough RAM
(512 MB in XP if you are multitasking), you will have to wait for apps to
swap to the pagefile on the HD.

That's what happened with XP. In the beginning nobody wanted it. Now how
many Windows users would be without it?

haha, I think all the people who suffered through the dibacle known as
windows ME were PRAYING for XP to come out. The smart ones on the other hand
stuck with 98 (as I did) until windows 2000 SP2 came out, then moved to that
until XP, and can proudly say ME never touched a single computer I own.

Nick wrote:

That's what happened with XP. In the beginning nobody wanted it. Now how
many Windows users would be without it?

haha, I think all the people who suffered through the dibacle known as windows
ME were PRAYING for XP to come out.

'think' again, plenty had enough of a clue to be able to use ME effectively.

The smart ones on the other hand stuck with 98 (as I did) until windows 2000
SP2 came out,

Some real downsides for some use.

then moved to that until XP, and can proudly say ME never touched a single
computer I own.

So you clearly arent qualified to say anything about it.

Rod Speed wrote:


So you clearly arent qualified to say anything about it.

And it would seem that you're just not qualified for anything. Doesn't
your mommy monitor what you're doing on the internet?

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 07:12:34 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Nick wrote:

That's what happened with XP. In the beginning nobody wanted it. Now how
many Windows users would be without it?

haha, I think all the people who suffered through the dibacle known as windows
ME were PRAYING for XP to come out.

'think' again, plenty had enough of a clue to be able to use ME effectively.



Essentially the issue was whether one had better than
average ability to tweak (and restrain) Windows or not.
With WinME it could run acceptibly (in the context of Win9x
running acceptibly, not NT), but you had to make changes
which is something many are hesitant to do.

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:26:41 GMT, "Fishface"
? wrote:

Merrill P. L. Worthington wrote:

Being an average computer user and not a heavy gamer (only MS Flight Sim
2004 and soon X-Plane), will I be able to notice much of a difference
between my current Athlon 64 3700 (1gb CAS2 RAM) and 3800 machines (2gb
CAS2 RAM)?

I was also wondering when I might see benefit from the dual core. I get
annoying
waits when I insert a CD and when I click on a floppy in Windows Explorer
(the
system tries to extract an icon from every single file). I guess it's
mostly device
drivers tying up the system for me. Hate that...



It depends on exactly what you are doing.
If your problem is that you need to see/use these slower
drives' files "next", the Dual Core will do you no good.

On the other hand, if the problem is that WHILE these slow
files are being indexed, you have another second task that
is being effected, it may retain it's responsiveness.

The only way to directly combat the sluggishness of the CD
or other slow storage is to use faster storage. "Sometimes"
the file format can matter, some types of multimedia for
example has shell support for determining resolutions and
other parameters read from the file, in which case if you
don't need these additional details you can look into
disabling the shell support for the features you don't need,
then the files will be treated as generic files with no
special abilities, beyond those of the application used to
actually open them in the traditional manner.

kony wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Nick wrote

That's what happened with XP. In the beginning nobody wanted it.
Now how many Windows users would be without it?

haha, I think all the people who suffered through the dibacle
known as windows ME were PRAYING for XP to come out.

'think' again, plenty had enough of a clue to be able to use ME effectively.

Essentially the issue was whether one had better than
average ability to tweak (and restrain) Windows or not.

Wrong, as always. No need to tweak it at all.

With WinME it could run acceptibly (in the context of Win9x
running acceptibly, not NT), but you had to make changes

Wrong, as always. My installations all ran better
than SE did with no tweaking what so ever.

which is something many are hesitant to do.

Not even necessary.

kony wrote:

On the other hand, if the problem is that WHILE these slow
files are being indexed, you have another second task that
is being effected, it may retain it's responsiveness.

Exactly. I'm dead in the water while this happens. I would
switch away for a little while. Sometimes CDRs can take
a *long* time to come up.

The only way to directly combat the sluggishness of the CD
or other slow storage is to use faster storage. "Sometimes"
the file format can matter, some types of multimedia for
example has shell support for determining resolutions and
other parameters read from the file, in which case if you
don't need these additional details you can look into
disabling the shell support for the features you don't need,
then the files will be treated as generic files with no
special abilities, beyond those of the application used to
actually open them in the traditional manner.

Oh, I'd like to do that. I Tried to fine out how, once, but
could not.