Core Duo & Win XP Pro

I don't know much about Core Duo - just that it has two cores to process the information simultaneously and so is faster. I learnt that applications that are built to take advantage of Core Duo architecture only will run faster otherwise there's no difference for single core and duo core. Is this true?
Then does Win XP Pro take advantage of Duo core architecture. I mean XP came way back in 2001 and Core Duo (Intel) were in market only since last few years.

I know I am wrong somewhere. But where?

 

Microsoft released a Hotfix for dual core processors which addresed the issue.

 

The dual core will always run faster, as a whole. If you take ONE application and run it only by itself, and that application is known to not take advantage of the two cores, then a faster clocked single core will be faster.
However, if you try to run that same program simultaneously with another program, the dual core will be your best friend.

Core Duo has only been out since this year. And XP will take advantage of dual core.

Hope I've helped and explained it well.

 

Core Duo is the way to go with you want speed and power and using XP Pro usually boosts it.

 

im assuming vista will be able to use dual cores without any hotfixes...

 

It is safe to assume that. Vista is to be compatible with "modern" CPU's and to me that means dual core. Seeing as how Pentium D and Athalon X2 are pretty much all over the place i think its safe to assume that.

I hope they make use of the second core aswell. That would really make the OS so much better for everything.

 

There's only so much that they can do as far as making use of the second core. Certainly, system processes can be distributed, but a great many of programs are single threaded, which means that Windows can't do anything to help. That's going to take software manufacturers adjusting the way they're doing things.

 

Vista won't take advantage of dual-core any more than XP will unfortunately. But if you run two programs at once, it is well worth it. I would not buy a notebook today unless it had dual-core. Hard to buy a computer today (unless it is low-end) that doesn't offer it.