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Windows Operating Systems Software Hardware

A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along? 659

Posted by timothy from the still-no-spyware-evident-on-fc3 dept.
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along? More

A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?

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  • Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yeldarb-7 ( 873124 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:00AM (#12259608) Homepage
    More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...

    • Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:03AM (#12259626) Homepage Journal
      but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...

      ...said the person whose website is (nearly) all in flash...

      • Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ErichTheWebGuy ( 745925 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:32AM (#12260018) Homepage
        lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources (AMD K6-2 @ 500 MHz) for more than 6 seconds... With nothing else running besides IceWM and Firefox. Granted it was flash, but hell, my browser had to load the required libraries to load his/her website, much like a WP loads libraries. Oh, and Open Office actually loads faster (~4 secs). So who is wasting resources?

        • Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Ernesto Alvarez ( 750678 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @10:16AM (#12261477) Homepage Journal

          lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources


          That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.

          Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).

          All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.

      • Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Funny)

        by grolschie ( 610666 )
        To be fair, he does have an HTML only option for slower machines (not that you'll see anything useful there though). ;-)

    • If you want to use Wordperfect 5.1, go for it. But I like a word processor to do a little more for me now a days, and that includes all the nifty things OpenOffice and Microsoft Office can do for me.

      Maybe you don't write system documentation or work with complicated spreadsheets, but I do, and I welcome the feature rich applications available today.

      Stop spreading your FUD. You don't need a 2Ghz machine to run a word processor. A 350Mhz Pentium II will run Open/Microsoft Office just fine, assuming you

      • What was said was not FUD. FUD is what you try to instill in another's mind if you want to discourage them from choosing a competitor's product or service or point of view, even.

        The original comment was about proper, concise coding. That doesn't happen often because programmers typically build upon older legacy code because there's no time, money or organizational will to start from scratch.
      • I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?

        Considering the speed limit on the freeway I take to work every day is 75mph... yes, I do need a car that can go above 65.

        Also, running a car at its top speed isn't good for the engine. Running a processor at its top speed doesn't really affect it one way or another.

      • Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:49AM (#12260080) Homepage
        Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
        • Office 2003 runs just fine and non-laggy on one of my P3 500's.

          The P166 came out around 1995, and Office 97 in 1997, that's 2 years lead time. The Pentium 500 came out in 1999, and Office 2003 in 2003 - that's four years lead time.

          Considering those numbers, I still don't see where all this bloat is being factored in. Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.

          A

      • Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Dolda2000 ( 759023 ) <fredrik.dolda2000@com> on Sunday April 17, 2005 @08:28AM (#12261078) Homepage
        Well, I write all kinds of documentation, and I find that with emacs and LaTeX, I can do that on much slower processors than 350 MHz PIIs, and with a lot less memory than any WYSIWYG word processor you can point to would require. Not only that, but I become much more productive because of the more streamlined interfaces of emacs vs. any GUI-driven application, and because of the more complete capabilities of LaTeX vs. OpenOffice Writer/Microsoft Word.

        As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.

        Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.

      • Meh, I regularly make spreadsheets that are full of calculated cells that depend on another spreadhseet. . . the idea being that since I generally only need to perform XXX analysis on a spreadsheet once, I can set up a system where I give the original some pre-defined name, open the analysis spreadhseet, wait for it to do the calculations, then copy and paste the analysis to save it.

        Only problem is, to do, say, seven calculations per row (simple ones, like "=B2-C2" and "=LEFT(D4, 10)" ) on an external spre

    • so you're a web designer, huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:21AM (#12259729)
      hint: web sites should not need instructions [barbdwyer.com].

    • Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *
      More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does

      Sounds like something that could actually get .net apps running in the near vicinity of fast, as opposed to downright hang-dog slow.

      As I've seen over the years, the more CPU(s) you throw at developers (myself included) the mo

    • More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...

      Using up all resources can be good, for example games will eventually want all of both cores. The second will have extra eye candy. For example extra smoke and dust particles in a racing game. Yes, that example was stolen

    • Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Funny)

      by happyemoticon ( 543015 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @03:18AM (#12260177) Homepage
      My word processor doesn't lag. I use emacs.

  • The 1st link (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:01AM (#12259613)
    Am I the only one who can't open the first link in a new tab in Firefox? It wants me to open it with "FirefoxHTML", which opens it in the current tab.

    • Re:The 1st link (Score:3, Informative)

      by Datasage ( 214357 )
      Its making me download the page and view it locally. The headers look messed up, might be due to a poorly written script thats sending out incorrect headers.

      Content-Type: text/html
      ; charset=ISO-8859-1

      That line, although valid, though not be two lines. The line break is throwing Firefox off.

  • Why don't we (Score:3, Funny)

    by ericdano ( 113424 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:01AM (#12259615) Homepage
    Port OS X 10.4 to the chip. Then on one core, run OS X, and the other Linux?

    Who wants to waste all that power running virus software? I don't get it.

    • I think the point would be to run anti-virus software.

      Although, if virus writers would limit their CPU usage to just the second core, thus freeing up the first one, maybe people would stop bugging me about their system running so slowly.

  • Wait for the PPC (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rick and Roll ( 672077 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:02AM (#12259620)
    I am a linux fan, but I am not so blinded to know that over the last couple of years, Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage. So I'd say if you really want extra performance that you can use, and won't get wasted by bloat, wait until a Macintosh is released with a dual-core processor.

    • Re:Wait for the PPC (Score:3, Informative)

      by ericdano ( 113424 )
      Perhaps this Sunday [macrumors.com]? It would really make encoding video a lot faster, as well as anything else that needs a lot of horsepower. Like Protools, or Logic, or Digital Performer.

      Wonder what Tiger would be like on a dual core processor......

  • people make jokes about it but (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:04AM (#12259635)
    really, it is that bad.. take a look at some of these power consumption figures for intel's "dual module chip."

    http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=23 89

    Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.

  • Spyware (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sweed ( 851139 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:05AM (#12259640)
    Yeah, Windows users need the second core to run all that spyware. It'll probably help a lot!

    • Re:Spyware (Score:3, Funny)

      by jamesh ( 87723 )
      What we really need is a triple core cpu. One core to run the spyware. One to run software to try and counter the spyware. And one to actually do some useful work.

      • Re:Spyware (Score:3, Funny)

        by Dachannien ( 617929 )
        And one to actually do some useful work.

        You mean you can use computers to do useful work?

        Huh. I guess you really do learn something new every day!

  • Uh... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:06AM (#12259651) Homepage Journal
    ...most of us are quite intentionally using multi-tasking OS's. A new chip comes along that helps that multi-tasking, and people are seeking reasons not to use it?

    • Re:Uh... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 )
      No, the point of it is, what is the value of so many of those processes, which serve only to protect against the myriad horrible security vulnerabilities that are inherent to Windows?

      Consider the second core with all those anti-malware apps running on them to be "protection money" that you spent to run whatever programs you actually wanted to do stuff with. Is it really justifiable to spend money on a proprietary OS for the privilege of opening yourself to all those attacks just so you can get a little w

  • Actually I think this is an excellent idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:07AM (#12259654)
    It's like having a seperate harddrive for all your apps and essentials than all your media. That way the core you are really using can do 100% what you want (ie play games) I don't know enough about the technology to really say for sure, but this seems like it is just a more efficient division of labor, and you could get excellent performance out of it. An another note, though, I can't believe people have that much bloatware that they actually NEED an ENTIRE second core to run it all. I hate modern software. I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.

    • Re:Actually I think this is an excellent idea (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.

      Yes, because it's that much better to waste it to run spyware and viruses instead.
  • ...you need a second processor core just to run the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.


    Good god. More seriously, just seeing people put ideas like that out makes me cringe, not because it's not necessary but because it seems to me that thinking like that will only lead companies like Microsoft to dedicate the second core to nothing but fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. I suppose it's inevitable, though. Programming, especially of the bad, lazy or bloated variety, always seems to expand to fill and tax whatever hardware is available to it.

    • Right on, RIGHT ON my brothah!!!

      I have been heavily researching the construction of a dual Opteron box to become the main server in my house. The main reason I want two procs is so that I have enough power to run several virtual machines using the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor. THIS is what a dual core processor should be used for. If the CPU is powerful enough and you are a bit of a cheapskate, you could even use the second core to be a low end 3D accelerator for games using some kind of open source driv
    • Agreed.

      PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason

      Because PCMag is staffed entirely by corrupt idiots who are paid not to point out to their similarly idiotic readers that with the tiniest bit of intelligence and due diligence anti-virus/anti-spyware software is completely unnecessary, even in Windows. The story blurb also mentions firewalls, but that's stupid; it doesn't take up any extra CPU time in any real way.

      On top of all this, as others have also pointed out, anti-virus/spyware software is often

  • come on... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bedessen ( 411686 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:07AM (#12259658) Journal
    The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

    • Re:come on... (Score:3, Informative)

      by LihTox ( 754597 )
      The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use.

      That was my thought when I saw the first mention of using the second core for a virus scan. However, a little later in the article, the author devotes a par

      • Re:come on... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dr. GeneMachine ( 720233 )
        Footnore to this - a virus scanner doesn't usually slow me down because of its computational cost - it the additional disk access operations that make it a PITA. Dual core won't help with that.

  • ...what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:08AM (#12259660)
    Seriously, what in the world is this article about?

    Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.

    I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.

    • Re:...what? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's not news. It's a plug for his website. That first link belongs to the submitter.

    • Re:...what? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by burns210 ( 572621 ) <maburns@gmail.com> on Sunday April 17, 2005 @03:36AM (#12260220) Homepage Journal
      They can do 2 things at a time, but they are still going to the same computer components... Running a game alongside your AV scan STILL isn't going to work, because your AV software is still using the same system bus to go to the same IDE cable to go to the same harddrive. Just because your processors is duplicated, doesn't mean the rest of your system is.
  • But Windows really does have truly horrific levels of fug (in the Pratchettian sense of 'air so full of toxic waste you can cut it with a knife') in it.

    What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.

  • Clearly this is where things are heading (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JudgeFurious ( 455868 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:10AM (#12259671)

    I don't do PC's anymore outside of work where we have everyone clamped down pretty tight so I had kind of lost touch with how bad it really was out there. Last week I had one of my users bring in his PC that was locking up on him and doing the usual "strange stuff" that users talk about. I really never did get around to trying to fix anything though.

    I sat in awe as the thing, with no programs open and nobody touching it spent most of the day fighting it's own little virus/spyware battle. Between Symantec and the (easily) half a dozen anti-spyware programs he had installed the computer sent a constant stream of pop-up windows coming at me warning me about assorted files and registry keys it thought suspicious and busily scanning it's ass off.

    I wondered how he got any work done on the thing with it spending so much in the way of resources on "self defense". This is the answer in Windows world, they're going to eventually sell you a PC that's really two in one with the first one dedicated to just running the OS and all this crap you have to buy to keep from being bent over by the virus writers and the other virus writers who create spyware/adware.

  • Dead homies (Score:5, Funny)

    by lostngone ( 855272 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:10AM (#12259676)
    One Core for me and one Core for all my dead homies.

  • Download the windows 2nd Core patch here (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:14AM (#12259699)
    http://www.getfirefox.com/

  • Hits the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tidewaterblues ( 784797 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:18AM (#12259717)
    Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.

    Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.

    Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.

  • Way of the future? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The boojum ( 70419 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @01:23AM (#12259736)
    A lot of the systems folks that I've been hearing from and things that I've been reading have suggested that, like it or not, multi-core systems are the way of the future. The argument is that the clock-speed aspect of Moore's law has been slowing down for the past couple of years and that we've seen single processors that are as fast as they'll go with current chip design and fabrication technology. (Barring fundamental breakthroughs, of course.) Hence parallelism and multi-core systems.

    I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.

    In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.

  • What a load of hypocritical garbage, (Score:4, Informative)

    by Oliver Defacszio ( 550941 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:14AM (#12259955)
    An obsolete 400mHz machine doesn't run any modern desktop apps on any OS well, while a modern 2.5+gHz machine runs XP with anti-virus and a firewall so seamlessly that it's not even noticeable. So, what's the point? Anyone who claims that Windows NEEDS an extra core just to run maintenance apps is absolutely full of shit and is nothing more than a pathetically stereotypical "Ha ha, Windows sucks" fanboy.

    In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster on my old C433/256 than Mandrake 9.2 *or* FreeBSD 4.3 with no A/V or firewall. But, since I dare say so on Slashdot, I'm either a liar or a paid Microsoft shill.

    • "An obsolete 400mHz machine doesn't run any modern desktop apps on any OS well"

      Ahem, my setup is a Cube 450Mhz, running the latest OS, and I'm looking forward to upgrading to Tiger.

      Of course I *want* a faster machine, but to be honest, I don't *need* it. I do video, CAD, graphics, pictures, music, telephony and of course a lot of other things.

      And no, it won't run Doom III very well. But I knew when I bought it five years ago, that it wasn't a gaming machine (although I've logged quite a few hours of Quak

  • What about I/O? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aduzik ( 705453 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:46AM (#12260070) Homepage

    What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.

    The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.

  • The sump pump approach to security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @02:47AM (#12260074) Homepage
    People bitch about the 20% or so worst case overhead for a secure microkernel, and then they want to tie up a processor running anti-virus software. This is like dealing with a roof leak by install a sump pump.

  • Intel Marketoids (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 ) <deliverance@level4 . o rg> on Sunday April 17, 2005 @03:28AM (#12260200) Journal
    Well since Intel is throttling back to 3.2 for these things I guess we'll have to suffer marketting crappola for a while.

    Amd is releasing at 2.4 (Their fastest) as well as a 2.6 and 2.8 dual core within weeks of their first announcement. So they will just be faster and dual core so um sweet!

    • Re:Intel Marketoids (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 )
      Um an AMD64 2.2Ghz is for the most part faster than a Prescott P4 3.2Ghz [the cpu Intel currently makes a lot of].

      In fact doing builds of LibTomCrypt I had to enable HT and only then would I get build times similar to my AMD64 ...

      So it takes an extra Ghz and HT to get close (well without HT it takes roughly +7 seconds or so) to and AMD64....

      Tom

  • SMP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @03:39AM (#12260228) Homepage Journal
    I work regularly on a real SMP system, I and consequently I've been drooling for dual core since I first heard the x86 CPU vendors were (finally) getting around to adding it.

    SMP makes a massive difference on a system - if your workloads benefit. Mine do - I spend a lot of time compiling things, and the compiling (on the right codebase) tends to scale in an almost linear way with number of CPUs. Not only does SMP make this vastly faster, but it leaves your system so much more responsive that it's hard to believe.

    Even if dual core CPUs have only half the benefits (I imagine the Intel ones will, given their memory bandwidth needs) I'd still be really tempted. The power consumption is a nasty issue though.

  • AV is also disc (Score:3, Insightful)

    by marcovje ( 205102 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @04:35AM (#12260396)
    An old helldesk hacks opinion:

    The slowing effect of protection stuff is as much diskaccess, the growing size of binaries (ever entered a directory with a few 100MB self extracting .exe's?) as the pure CPU.

    The main problem with protection stuff is that nowadays people seem to develop software to be able to run stand-alone on todays hardware. People that run a bit more, or use yesterdays computer are left in the cold.

    However it is pretty much also the customers fault. They buy the new versions while pretty much nothing changed except the versionnumber, a new desktop theme, and something to make it up to date with buzzwords. (wifi/xml).

    Stick to your old versions of aviri as long as the signatures are still on. Kill the firewall, it is useless anyway if you are patched correctly. I know that the avg user is paranoid and thinks every FW event is a threat averted, but in reality they are just a few scanning bots and nutters.

    I'm only lukewarm to security (do my patches every so and so many months, and use the oldest still support McAfee engine), and no firewall, while I'm in a totally open university net. Despite that I had more dataloss and trouble from protection software than from actual malware.

    Oh, and btw, if you reinstall your Windows, PLEASE disconnect the network, and install the SPs and a select few (worm) hotfixes from CD. Half of the hacked machines are hacked during install, not use.

  • Why a second CPU is good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @04:54AM (#12260479)
    Okay, I got asked a while back why anyone would need a second CPU - it's not like the CPU usage for 1 is ever 100% is it?. Actually it is for me - frequently - and I suspect it is for others too if they:
    1. Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
    2. Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
    3. Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
    4. Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
    5. Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
    6. Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
    7. Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
    8. Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
    9. Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
    If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.

  • Idiocy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EnglishTim ( 9662 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @06:24AM (#12260732)
    Running a virus checker slows down your computer because of the amount of disk accesses, not because it's using up your computer's CPU power. Adding an extra core isn't going to help.

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