On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 19:17 -0500, Andy obrien wrote: > I like to multitask, and I am greedy... I like to keep an eye on > several things at once. I am thinking about a better PC, one with > enough CPU capability to run many tasks at the same time. Is there a > way to calculate the total CPU demands of severall applications. Here > is a list of what I often run at the same time (or wish i could) > > Commander (or HRD) > Winwarbler (or Multipsk) > DX Keeper > Spotcollector > Pathfinder > DX View > Weather Watcher > Firefox > Spectravue or SDR-RADIO Console > Fldigi > WSJT/JT65-HF > Dimension 4
In a word, no. Modern operating systems are very good at seemingly doing several things at once, even though you may only have a single CPU. If you are concerned with this, get a multi-core CPU so you can give your operating system more parallel capabilities. Also having a great graphics card with a proper driver can lift a lot of CPU responsibility. I prefer nVidia with the nVidia drivers. You don't say which operating system you are running. XP has a natural limit of 2 CPU's. Windows servers have an option to buy support for multiple CPU's. Linux can use all the CPU's it can find. From what I read, Windows 7 can support 2 sockets and each socket can have a multicore CPU in it. That means it would be possible and even reasonably inexpensive to have a pair of 4 core AMD Opterons running under Windows 7 or Linux. I'm running a single quad core AMD Phenom 9600 under Linux and it's loafing all the time, regardless of what I'm doing. I have yet to see any CPU lag on this machine. It has an Nvidia 9600 video card. Generally speaking, RAM is more important than CPU so make sure you are not ram starved before you blame the CPU.
