Which core should I be using the most when doing heavy multitasking ?

[-RockMan-]

I have been having a little problem with how XP and mostly vista handles the workloads from my celeron e1400. whenever I record a movie off of my tv tuner card, upload video footage from my camera on to youtube and anything else, I usually put the heavy programs on core 1 and small stuff like, open office, antivirus and winamp on core 0....

It really hasn't helped much at all, and it seem's like windows xp and vista cpu usage always stays at around 85% or 90%.
When it's done it will idle at 45% or more, what core is real and which one is virtual so I can help the celeron easily handle the workload better ? I added 2gbs of ram 3 weeks ago, and it's really helping the computer stay ahead of really slow down problems and crashes.

 

[Fat.Clown]

both cores are real

instead of setting affinity on your programs why not just let it run free?

if it only uses 1 core without setting affinity, the program probably doesn't take advantage of multi core processors

if it idles at 45% or more.... you should look into background programs, see what's program is using up your resources

 

[-RockMan-]

Thats the problem though, in a couple of hours I plan on burning some videos I got from my tv tuner card onto a video using convertx2dvd, code some music that I've been working on the past 2 weeks, submit applications to 15 to 20 employers in georgia, defragment with diskeeper and etc and etc...

I just need to know which programs to put on 1 core on the others on another, when I don't set it to affinity, that outcome slows down the pc which means I can't touch it until it's done and god forbid that **** always happens when I don't tell the celeron cores to handle this tasks and other one try to handle these tasks.

Do you understand what I am trying to say now ?

 

[Nagasama]

anything you are encoding will easily use an entire core on its own. i'd set it to that and let the other programs run on the second.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

The reason it is slowing down is because it is a low end processor, those apps are most likely capable of using BOTH cores, but will max them out, it will cause it to encode/decode faster, but make the pc seem unresponsive... IMO either upgrade the CPU or let it run the way the programs are designed to.

 

[Nagasama]

that would be the way i'd do it.

 

[Fat.Clown]

Mike, if your computer "idles" at constant 45% or more, I'd look into that, perhaps run through Osiris's guide