Athlon X2 on System with two users logged in?

[homestarmy]

I have a system set up at home that constantly my girlfriend uses at home while I am logged into at work.

She does a lot of graphic stuff including Adobe Photoshop, etc. I often am moving a lot of files, downloading things, maybe encoding video.

Can it be assigned to one core per user? Or will it just know to use the second core when the first is maxed out? Or?

When does it decide to use the second core? How is it assigned from one to another? Is there a short synopsis that I can read about this?

 

[TanisHalfElven]

you could manually set affinity. generally if one core is in use windows automatically utilises the other core.
however i think your problem (slowdown i bet) maybe either disk i/o or ram)

 

[dguy6789]

Windows usually does a relatively good job of assigning various tasks to the cores and balancing the load. As suggested above, any slowdown you are experiencing is likely due to another factor, such as a lack of harddrive power or memory.

I am looking for some articles to enlighten you on dual core. This one has some good information.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2388&p=5

 

[SunnyD]

Look at it from two standpoints here. First, the Windows Kernel Scheduler should provide a pretty good mix especially with 2 cores. Second, if you force her into using an affinity of 1 core only, her common applications (Photoshop?) will run a lot slower, as the professional applications such as Photoshop generally can take advantage of multiple CPU's. Not only that, but the slower her apps run, the more time she will be using the IO subsystems spread over time, leading to possible slower throughput overall.

Your usage pattern is more troublesome, as you're looking a a lot of disk IO. This is by far the slowest subsystem on the workstation - and yes, it does use a bit of CPU (especially video processing, which can easily eat up both cores alone).

I think you might as well leave well enough alone, or just get a second computer.