I’ve had a while to come up the learning curve for Vista on my replacement laptop that has a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 bit processor in it. The dual-core Athlon doesn’t score as well as comparable Intel Core Duo processors, but I’ve already noticed a much better response time than my older, single-core processor machines, even the higher clock speed 64 bit Athlon laptop that was destroyed by a milk spill (of all things). Unfortunately, the dual-core Athlon seems to run rather hot, and the placement in this laptop is such that the heat makes it up to the touch pad and palm rest area on the top of the laptop.

Perhaps I should be one of the testers for hardware designers because of my heavily multitasking ways. I generally have at least 10 windows open, from at least 4 applications, with multiple tabs open in my four browser windows. I use the alt-tab key combination to switch back and forth while I read/write and otherwise use the computer. In the past, within a few days, I would overwhelm a single-core processor computer, no matter how high the clock speed, once I had installed all my applications and had configured everything to my liking. This new dual-core laptop seems to be taking it all in stride.

I think my ultimate machine will be the Macintosh that will eventually come out that has two Intel quad-core processors. Of course, I won’t be able to afford it, but I can dream, can’t I?