Dual core doesn't seem faster when multi tasking

Check to make sure Windows is properly detecting your CPU as a dual core. Look in your device manager. Or you could check your performance under task manager and see how your usage is looking. Did you download the AMD Dual Core drivers?

Yes, it detects it OK. I haven't looked at the CPU useage...

Are you talking about the AMD X2 Optimizer app? I DID have it installed but recently rebuilt the PC again (was having some real weird problems and wanted to do a bare bones install so as to narrow it down. Turned out to be yet another bad stick of Corsair ram!) I'll reinstall it the X2 app.

Thanks!

Yeah, sorry, I didn't really mean drivers. There's two applications on AMD's website for dual cores. They help a lot. Also, if you still feel like it's slow after, you can look at your CPU usage. I'm sure your burning or rendering is single-threaded, so one core should be maxed out, but you should still have another free core, so anything else you're doing shouldn't be lagged.

Burning and compiling will use the hard drive a lot. Compiling will probly write to page file a lot, while burning the dvd reads from the drive at the same time. I don't think that multicore will improve this.

Perhaps more RAM will help if it means that the system uses the page file less so more hardddrive usage will be devoted to dvd burning.

I don't have any experience with Raid but that might help too.

If you have two serial ata harddrives, you can burn from one harddrive and compile on the other (non-RAID). I know that using dedicated hardrives for tasks can improve performance, for example when doing real-time encoding from TV-tuner data.

cheers

What's probably slowing you down is having a PATA hard drive and a burner on the same IDE bus. Is your 400GB hard drive your OS drive? PATA doesn't support any type of command queueing, which makes the most difference in multitasking.

That could be it. Put some more use into that SATA hard drive and see if that helps I guess.

Wow...good feedbacK! The sata drive is the "c" drive the OS and all aps. The Pata drive(s) are the D drive and DVD drive...Primary and secondary Masters. Does this affect things?