BigT:
The more important thing is whether you have a PCI Express motherboard. If you’ve got that, you’re golden, as XP support is pretty much a given (and I checked just to make sure.) Though I would consider upgrading to Vista to take advantage of the DirectX 10 support. With the right settings, Vista can run pretty much the same as XP, or better, as long as you’ve got the memory.
Thanks - I had to download a utility to figure out whether my motherboard was PCI express compatible but it looks like it is.
As far as Vista, since Windows 7 is only a few more months away now I’d rather wait for that.
Casserole:
Rigamarole , I used to tell my customers a very handy car analogy which I think works to describe the difference between your old computer and your new one, thusly:
Your old computer’s processor was built in the last-generation, when intel was focused on creating rip-roarin’ high-clocking CPUs. Similar to muscle cars of the late 70s-80s (or something…).
At one point, Intel decided that while they could cram more and more horses into an engine, there would be a point down the road where they’d come to a dead stop, where even squeezing one more horse out of the engine would take an inordinate amount of R&D money. At the same time, AMD had been churning out chips that easily matched Intel chips’ power, at a lower clock speed.
So, they decided to backpedal and focus on efficiency , like AMD. This is where the Core2Solo/Duo/Quad processors come in. They came onto the market with efficiency in mind, so a beefy 3.2 GHz P4 from the last generation paled in comparison to a nimble 2.66 GHz Core2Solo.
Duo and Quad refer to the number of logical cores on the CPU. The more the better.
Does that help?
It helps me realize that a company (that should be nameless) that was hiring help desk people to work from home, did miss a lot of very capable people thanks to the requirements that they demanded from the computers of the job applicants.
True story:
I could not apply to the job they were offering because the speed I have was 2.66, yes, a dual core one and it is fast. That technology company was demanding that new workers had a 3.0 GHz or faster CPU to be able to work from home. :smack:
