Dual Core compatibility in XP

yes it does. there are more Core Duos running XP than there are OS X.

BUT... any single application, whether or not they can take advantage of 2 cores, is up to the application, as is the case if it is running OS X, XP, Linus, Solaris, etc...

XP will of course distribute all running apps and processes among the available cores, so helps for services and background application performance.

"there are more Core Duos running XP than there are OS X."

...Not for long. 🙂

Jim


PowerBook G3 500 Mhz "Pismo"/ 2.0Ghz BlackBook 2GB OWC RAM Mac OS X (10.4.7)

actually.... yes, for the next couple of years at least, and probably for longer than that

well... if you take into account vista being released soon, perhaps that will help even the score sooner than later, but unfortunately, Apple's market share is still very low. perhaps for users that are happy with the status quo, there might be compelling reasons not to see the Apple become a main stream player.

I used this system;

2.7Ghz X2 3800+ (overclocked)
2 gigs DDR3200
X1800XT

And that ran windows XP Home SP2 with dual core patches no better than an Athlon 64 single core at 2.4Ghz. The only place you see dual core being slightly tapped into are with games like Oblivion.

I owned this system from March and I have now sold it (last week) it replace it with Core 2 Duo based MacBook Pro. Vista is the only system that will make proper use of dual cores and if games are programmed to utilise them.

Very little will improve, as it stands Vista is a hunk of rubbish just like XP (even more so) so don't expect huge changes, just subtle ones!

Yes, but one issue is that some older software doesn't recognize the dual processors and won't run right unless you disable one of them.

To do so, launch your application (.exe) and open the task manager.
Control-click on the .exe and choose "Set affinity"
In the next box, you can disable one of the processors.
I've found this to be helpful for some older games.

Otherwise, considering it's Windows, it runs fantastically.

Scott

This issue has been addressed by the dual core hotfix for SP2, when I did not use this BF2 hard locked after playing for 1 minute. Only solution was to disable a core before playing.

With the hotfix this issue no longer plagues any appl or game as it switches off a core depending on the game or application code detected.

Now BF2 is hardly a master piece of software engineering but it shows how a lousy coded game can make life awkward for up to date systems. Anyway, more games and apps for both XP and OSX will make better use of this fabulous new technology soon enough, it is still early days as dual core coding is a tricky business!

If you mean THIS ONE I think I'll use my method for now.
They (MS) aren't very sure of this in the documentation, so I am going to stay safe and continue disabling one core for now.

Scott