On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 05:16:52 -0000 (UTC), 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
And 32 bit Windows XP, I believe, is incapable of making use of
hyperthreading and actually using those 4 cores - particularly if the
motherboard does not support hyperthreading (don't know if that unit
does or not)