Re: Those little annoying pauses would almost all be fixed with a dual core processor.
In my own experience, pretty much none of them are. I moved from a (single core, single socket) Opteron 146 to a dual core 4800+ system about a month ago.
The system still all but freezes from time to time when Acrobat is loading a web page, all but freezes when I click on "my computer" and it checks each of 20 different network drives, all but freezes during any one of a half dozen operations involving Outlook. If something (virus check, for example) is hammering the disk, dual core does seem to help maintain responsiveness slightly, but then my new disk is faster and has a bigger cache, too.
The windows user interface just seems to love to hang or slow way down, from time to time. Effectively, there's been no noticeable improvement in responsiveness going from single core to dual core.
It does seem a bit better at staying responsive if I'm running a compile or other big backgroud job, but I don't do that as much as I used to (mostly do administrative crap these days with Project and Visio and email, email, email).
It's been a real eye-opener, and it helps explain why AMD is bringing back some of the high end single core parts.
Maybe Vista will fix this.
It's enough to make someone want to take on the hassle of moving to a Linux desktop (if Linux desktops don't do the same thing). I've been running SuSE servers for a couple of years with very good experiences and the Novell desktop looks interesting. |
