Does anyone know if XP or Vista allow to partition the hard drive so you can put another system on the machine? I know about fdsk in older Windows versions but not to sure newer ones.

Are dual core machines more for gaming than anything else?

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

Dual CPUs let me run SETI@home without having any significant impact on what else I'm doing.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Did not consider like runinng several things at once, I guess it would help.

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

I work on a computer that can be booted both in winXP and Fedora Linux, if that's what you asked.

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Yes.thanks.

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

It's easy to create a dual boot situation when first installing windows. Later, it becomes more difficult, but it is still doable.

Dual core processors aren't just for gaming - they run almost everything faster, and especially when there is any kind of multitasking going on. Also, the Core 2 is a more efficient CPU design anyways, so for the same clock speed and power consumption, it will get far more done than a P4.

I know it's an obvious solution but I figure I'll put it out there anyway just in case ... you can just get another hard drive for Linux and install that as well. As clj said, it's a bit more involved to get one hard drive to be dual bootable if XP is already installed. I have no idea about Vista but I assume it's a similar process.

__________________
1·618033988749894848204586834365638117720309179805 76286213544862270526046281890244970720720418939113 74

Most current BIOS setups with multiple drives should allow you to choose which device you want to use as a boot device when starting the computer. The second HDD Josh suggested allows this to be done in a very clean manner, with no problems (partitions, extended partitions, logical drivers, etc.) related to having everything on one drive.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Basically, when windows installs, it sets itself as the active (boot) partition, and won't let you see the other OS. In a dual boot situation, you want the other OS taking care of things because everybody else plays nicer.

It's easier to set up if windows goes on first. The other OS will set up the dual-boot without a fuss.

__________________
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Some CPU intensive programs, such as the video editing program "Adobe Premiere Elements," make use of dual-core processors to speed-up the number crunching.

__________________
I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

Can hyperthreading be seen as a sort of semi-dual core?

Of course, next to dual core you also have real dual CPU PC's.

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Based on the Wikipedia article, my take is that hyperthreading is a "poor-man's" multicore whereby certain parts of the core are duplicated, but not others.

It should be pointed-out that Intel currently sells a quad core processor (although it may be two dual core processors in one package) and AMD has a quad core processor coming out in August. AMD claims that their architecture is better because it resolves some alleged memory bottleneck in the Intel design.

Disclaimer: I'm employed by AMD, but not in the processor department. To be honest, I haven't been following the recent evolution of processors carefully.

If I was purchasing a new machine, I'd get nothing less than a dual core 64 bit processor. It might be overkill for today, but new software has a way of eating-up every available CPU cycle.

__________________
I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

Overkill for today never hurts. I worked years on a simple pentium1 MMX 200 MHz computer, because I bought it with a back then huge overkill 512kB L2 cache. In fact, when I stopped using it, they still sold PC's with 256kB L2 .

That made for an expensive motherboard, but it was FAST.

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Thanks for the advice, the whole story is going to get notebook or laptop and wonderining about if dual core is worth the money. About adding the seperate OS I have some experience putting linux the same drive as Win 98, I was wondering if the newer versions still allowed to do this because this all get with the newer machines. Also I will have high speed at home soon too.

__________________
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

I've been a dual CPU nut since before it was cool with the dual cores. My first dual board was a Tyan Tomcat III, an old dual Pentium board in which I had two Pentium 133MHz chips.

"Old Reliable" here is an ABIT VP-6 running twin 1GHz PIIIs. And it still cuts the mustard, although my other box, a single CPU AMD-64 2GHz is actually faster.

Old Reliable will soon be getting another board, and I'm going to go with some sort of dual AMD-64 (or Intel EM64T, sometimes jokingly called iAMD64) mo/bo. WHat I would like to get is a dual, dual-core, for a total of 4CPU.

MS sort of played funny. NT Workstation (which evolved in Win2K, XP, and Vista) was limited to two CPUs -- only the server line would run more, and now with a pricing tier on that. Cheapest versions are limited to 4, next price will run 8, etc. Same kernel, just a limit on how many CPUs it would use. (Linux will run on up to 32 or 64).

But the question came up about hyperthreading, and dual cores, and unless MS changed its mind, they relented that one CPU is one physical chip that plugs in a socket. So a dual core counts as only "one physical CPU chip", and so XP or Vista will use all 4 equivalent CPUs of a dual socket, dual core board.

Hyperthreading is a mere "logical CPU". THe physical CPU processes two instruction streams, using the same resources. Dual core is truly two physical instruction processing units on the same chip, although they do share some other stuff.

Because of that, there are some subtle differences in how best to take advantage of hyperthreading.

Two physical CPUs, such as my ABIT board here, will do best with each one having its own separate task, where the caches of each don't interfere with each other. A hyperthreader, using the same physical caches is different. It's best there to have them just splitting up the same task.

The Win2K kernel, while it would run on a hyperthreader as two CPUs, was not aware of this difference, and would actually bog down a bit in some situations becase of this, running much slower than with hyperthreading disabled (cache "thrashing", I believe one could call it). They made the XP and later kernels aware of the difference, and wouldn't make that mistake.

-Richard

Actually, Vista sees the true dual cores as 2 processors, as does XP in many ways. However, it does know what to do with it. Most programs only use one of the 2 cores, seeing each as one processor (and they are single threaded programs). If you look at the actual CPU usage log, a lot of programs use almost exactly 50% of the cpu - that's because they're fully utilizing one core. However, it's still definitely worth it, because it's rare that only a single program is running, and any time that more than just a single program is running, the multi core architecture will be faster.

Yes, dual core is two processors, that's what it means, two CPU cores on one chip that plugs in one socket. Those two cores do share some minor things.

What I was talking about was a *hyperthreading* CPU, something Intel did a while back. Here a single CPU core splits itself into two logical processors. It is conceptually the same thing as time-slicing and regular threading, where the OS just time slices pieces of code in a queue, except here the hardware does it itself by processing two instruction streams at once (AMD always poo-pooed this, IIRC)

There is a big difference between those two, and that's what I was commenting about. Dual core is two physical pieces of instruction stream processing hardware.

My other comment was about the *licensing*. NT Workstation/Win2K/XP/Vista was limited to "two processors". The SMP kernel can theoretically go to 32, but for licensing reasons, they put limits. Now, with hyperthreading and dual core, that seemed unfair.

So they relented and said that, for purposes of licensing, one processor is one socket. The licensing refers to the number of sockets that will be supported. How many cores and hyperthreaders per socket will not matter.

So XP, running on a board with two sockets, each of which contains a Quad-core Intel chip with each core hyperthreading, will see that as 16 logical CPUs total. That is 8 physical cores, each splitting into two logical CPUs, for a total of 16.

-Richard

I have a 3.06 P4 with hyperthreading. It works OK in some situations, but it's certainly no dual core answer. The advantage it had was that it only took about 5-10% more circuitry added to the core while offering an increase between 15-35% on programs that could take advantage of it. Not a bad situation for the time.

Certainly the new dual cores are far better. I've been considering upgrading my main computer, but so far haven't done so. My old P4 is still doing me fine, and I don't have time for playing games like I used to. Although with Starcraft 2 coming out, I just might have to bite the bullet and build myself a new machine.

__________________
DOOM Master