Vista and dual core

Is there much of an improvement in vista with dual core CPUs than in XP SP2? I believe there is a patch to get the best performance out of dual core under XP so I was wondering if Vista provides better performance and utilisation of a dual core proc?

 

I think XP and Vista have had all the utilisation of dual core they need with the current options on an OS. Vista is more about better memory management than anything else I reckon. In the end it's really not about the OS but about the applications you install that support dual core. I mean XP has had dual core-like support for a while now, ever since the hyperthreading feature with the P4. see theres no point in running a dual core system if the programs you use dont support dual core, so your real worry is the programs you run.

 

There isn't much the OS can do to support multicore systems. XP does it all just fine, so the best Vista can hope for is, well, also doing it just fine...

As SideSwipe said, it mainly depends on the apps you run.

 

Yes, I am aware that apps need to be coded to make effective use of two cores but even if none of your apps are multithreaded, the OS should still be equally distributing the workload of different apps between the two cores. It was this management side of the two cores that I was interested in although it sounds from what you are saying that there is no real gain here from Vista. Looks like I will be sticking with XP for the time being. Thanks.

 

Yeah, it should, but as you might guess, that's actually fairly simple to do, and XP manages it pretty well... Which means there's not much room for improvement...