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  #10  
Old November 16th 03, 06:45 PM
William W. Plummer
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"Geoff" wrote in message
...
Thaddeus L Olczyk wrote:
I just recommended to a friend looking to upgrade that he look at
Dual CPU machines.


You need to look at what he is going to do with the machine. Most home
machines are used for the web, email, Word, Excel, etc. These are all
single thread programs (interrupts are a negligible load). So, more than
one CPU won't make anything faster.

Further, your hard disk is almost always the bottleneck as far as speed
goes -- look at what percent of the time your disk light is on. Multiple
CPUs will make this worse because one CPU will have to sit there tapping its
fingers while the other one is accessing the disk. A faster disk (15,000
RPM from IBM) will minimize the waiting. The right RAID configuration
(striping?) should help. SCSI interface doesn't make the disk turn faster
so it won't help.