Hello AllPlease excuse my ignorance but what exactly are quad cores and dual cores.I notice that some people seem to have for instance dual core 2,2GHz machines(or something like that)now the 2.2Ghz seems to be quite slow compared to say my p42.8GHz but single processor, but is the dual core machine although seemingly fairly low spec in fact a stonker because its the equivalent of having two processors or indeed four operating together.Hope that makes some sense.cheers ANDY

Andy,Dual and quad cores are exactly as described. Two and four cpu 'cores' on one die.However, a dual and quad core processor does not equal 2x and 4x the performance of a single core CPU. They will get better performance than a single core IF the software is written to take advantage of it. This is referred to as applications with 'multithreading' capabilities.Don't be thrown off by the speed in terms of Ghz.The new(ish) Conroe and Penryn architecture from Intel is signifcantly faster at processing instruction sets than the older P4 netburst architecture.Therefore a Core 2 Duo CPU at 2.13 Ghz lets say would be at least as quick as on old P4 at 3.0 Ghz, even without the dual core capability of the Core 2 Duo. By this I mean that even software that is not multithreaded will still run faster on the Core 2 Duo CPU because it can process the instructions faster on one core than the P4 can.Hope this helps.

HelloThanks for your explanation,whilst i won't pretend i understand all your post(architectures and suchlike:-) )i now Begin to understand a little more about these different processors.Very interestingThanks Andy:-)