Will a quad core work like this...

[Loony]

Let's say I'm surfing, listening to music, doing a virus scan, and doing a spyware scan. Would the virus scan be on one core, and then the spyware be on another, and then music on one, and the surfing on the last? Just curious.

[RAW-Raptor22]

Mmhhmm, yup.

[tyxeros]

Probably yes , but its pointless if all this applications occupies the same hard drive.

[SoulsCollective]

Sure, unless any of those applications were multi-threaded, which I'm pretty sure some AV programs are moving towards.

[NickS]

Yup The pro about Vista is it's natively multithreaded, so it divvy's up everything equally between all 4 (or two) cores.

[njkid32]

You'll find that windows uses core 0 more than any other cores. Depending on the program and if its not multithreaded the affinity wont automatically set itself to work over all 4 cores. So, if your running all those programs it wont spread evenly over all cores it'll lean more towards core 0 and 1. I've done this several times just to see how it works.

Edit: This is assuming that your using XP Thanks Nick I forgot about Vistacrap

[nn_step]

yep and if you want to manually set it
nnstep.com/taskassign.zip

[Loony]

There'd be 4 hard drives in RAID 0, which I guess I could have just said yea, one hard drive.

So, XP won't do that?

[RAW-Raptor22]

Not automatically, but thru task manager it does.