HerHusband wrote:
a 1.8 Ghz quad has got to be faster than my current 2.3Ghz dual core.

Only if your software can take advantage of the extra cores. This is
usually limited to processor intensive work like photo and video
editing.

Otherwise, a quad core CPU won't be noticeably faster than a dual
core. CPU's spend most of their time waiting for your next mouse
click or keypress anyway. For casual use you're not likely to see any
difference.

Open your task manager when you have your most common applications
running and see what kind of CPU load you have. Unless you're really
loading your current CPU, you probably won't see a real world
difference.

You can look up the benchmarks for each of the CPU's and see what
kind of theoretical improvement you might achieve. But again, those
differences only apply if the software can make use of the faster CPU.

These days a hard drive is more of a bottleneck than the CPU.

Anthony Watson
www.watsondiy.com
www.mountainsoftware.com

I'm leaving the task manager open (minimized) and watching the cpu usage ,
I frequently see it running over 70% , and maxed out pretty often .
Especially when opening a web browser or loading a newsgroup . I'm just
tired of sitting here waiting for the comp to catch up with a new task and
figgered for under 20 bucks it's worth a try . The wife's "new" Lenovo quad
core I5 machine can dance circles around this thing ....
--
Snag