I just wanted to say I love Dual Core :)

So over the weekend, I was working on my new (( well not so new, it’s 5 months old, but you know what I mean 🙂 )) PC at home. To wit, I was transcoding about 400 MB of DivX video onto a DVD.

At the same time, I decided to get caught up atleast a little on my backlog of photos and fired up Photoshop CS3.

So I know have two huge memory hogging apps open – Nero and Photoshop. No slow-down at all.

Processing a blurry photo, I start running a fairly intensive filter on the photo in PS. It crawls along at a glacial pace.

I fire up Task manager and realize nero is grabbing 100% of both CPUs. No problem – right click on Nero, set affinity to CPU1 and voila! the Filter in photoshop starts flying along. Couple of minutes later, it’s done and I set Nero back to normal affinity.

The best part of all this? At no time did any of my app windows stop refreshing and just blank out – the filter progress bar updated normally, I could alt-tab without any delay. Basically my machine remained completely usable – how freaking awesome is that?

Of course, the dual-core isn’t the only thing that made the difference – this would never have worked if I did not have 2 GB of RAM to work with. But Dual Core + lots of RAM = that’s like hot chocolate fudge on ice-cream.. makes everything better 😀