New computer .......

Well, so far so good. The new bits arrived at around 12.30 and despite stopping for lunch by 3pm I was playing new material into AA. installation was reasonably painless, though the second IDE port on the Asus MB is about as far away from my DVD writers as it's possible to get, and without a longer cable than that supplied I've only managed to reach one of them in my average-size tower case. I also had to disable the SATA/RAID boot rom, despite a strong warning in the manual against it, to allow the system to boot up with the Plextor writer connected - the only point where there was any head-scratching on my part.

There seem to be an excess of features I've not bothered with - remote control, for example - but once I'd stopped fighting with XP wanting to install new hardware and Plextools trying to take over the DVD writer I managed to get the two driver discs in and installed painlessly. I'm sure I've got a GB more memory than XP will use, so what happens to that I don't know. As for my four cores, well three of them are currently idle (during mono 32-bit record) and one is rather snootily lowering itself to providing about 3 percent of its available juice for this menial task!

I did run a quick NR using Izotope's new RX suite, which at its most extreme setting is desperately power hungry, and it does seem to bring thing to somewhere within the realms of the practical - in other words hugely faster than before, if still nowhere near real time. What I didn't check was whether it was using all four cores at this point - if not I have no idea whether I can persuade it to. Quad-core I may have, but about it I know practically nothing...

32-bit XP will use about 3.4GB out of the 4GB (which is better than some motherboards, or 32-bit Vista, will allow).  If you want one program to use more than 2GB (only Hauptwerk, out of non-server programs I know, can benefit from this) you need a /3GB switch in boot.ini.  But otherwise, the spare memory (up to 3.4GB, that is) is used as system cache, and of course more programs can be loaded simultaneously without interfering.  If a 64-bit upgrade should become desirable within the life of this system, then the whole memory will be accessible to it.

Similarly with the cores - not many programs will use them all, but several programs can use different cores, and Windows itself can use a different core from the programs that are running, so the net effect is a more responsive system.  With the recent general appearance of dual and quad core processors in normal systems, there will surely be a lot of pressure for programmers to enable their programs to use them.

Paul

I'll tell ya my dual core computer is running great...super fast....it's like driving a race car to go grocery shopping ...maybe a bit overkill, but it's running very quick.....I tried converting a wav file to mp3 the other day.... and zoooooop, in about 2-3 seconds it was done.

Vista has been running great so far....only problem is no Vista drivers for the 1010LT or 2496 sound cards.

A certain imminent audio program has been coded to take full advantage of multicore processors, it says...

Meanwhile I've cracked through a load of work this afternoon in a fraction of the usual time. Being able to run three or four processor-intensive tasks simultaneously without taking a hit on any of them is - for now - amazing.

Getting back briefly to this new Izotope package. The most extreme NR process is now about 4 times faster than my old PC, but still runs at less than half real time. However., I can power up four instances of Izotope RX and run them in parallel on four different files. Net result - 16 times greater work-rate. Now that's real progress for me...