C2D - speed question

it is normal, if your talking about general responsiveness(app load times, small file compression/decompression, ect) , CPU's haven't been the bottleneck in that area since around the era of the PIII's. rather if you want more responsiveness, adequate ram (IE more then 512MB of DDR or better), and hard drives with fast seek times, and burst speeds, and high overall throughputs, are what will make your computer seem more responsive. if you really want to see the difference get PCmark, and run it at both stock and your overclock. but just a really good overclock, generally wont net you any noticeable improvements in responsiveness.

Increase, decrease...you know what I mean!

A faster CPU at that level doesn't necessary mean faster load times in Firefox, etc. A browser will be limited by your net connection. Loading programs may depend on your hard drive speed and cache......I think this is what you are referring to: "load times".

The CPU will REALLY make a difference in 2 major respects:

1) it will run Windows and other background processes without breaking a sweat and you'll notice how Windows runs smoother, especially when running other applications (ie--Multitasking);

2) in CPU-intensive applications, your "crunching" times will improve dramatically......DVD encoding, pic rendering, whatever. Anything basically other than games....those improvements will be nominal.