Yahoo Desktop Search Loading Down your Machine

[wwswimming]

i have an Asus P4C800 with a Pentium 4 that runs with a 10% OC at 3.3 GHz. it has 4 GB of RAM which shows up as about 3.18.

i use it for CAD & related 3D programs and of course watching the occasional video.

when i use Yahoo Desktop Search to find something, it totally bogs down.

how much Liberty & Freedom do you get with the C2D, in terms of being able to use YDS to manage a larger database, as a background task while working on fairly resource intensive stuff.

i'm curious how much difference people are noticing in multi-tasking, between the 2 MB shared cache (6300, 6400) and the 4 MB shared cache (6600 etc.) CPU's.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Having any dual-core CPU would probably help you tremendously. First because the YDS app could operate using one of the cores, while your foreground tasks work on the other core. This is one of the big things people have been liking about dual-CPU machines for years, it tends to make overall desktop usage "smoother" because you're more likely to have a CPU core available that's not busy with other tasks at any particular time.

Additionally, your 3D apps are probably multi-threaded. I don't know about the CAD software, a brief Google search seems to indicate some CAD software makers may be ignoring multi-threading.

As for cache performance, here's one comparison. It also shows that even the lower-speed Core2Duo chips are significantly faster than the best PentiumD CPUs, and the Pentium Extreme Edition just barely beats the E6300. The Core2 would in and of itself help your 3D work.

Of course, I don't know much about Yahoo Desktop Search in particular. If it's having to do a lot of disk activity, then no amount of CPU power is likely to help you, and setting up a system with a RAID array would help more.

As for your memory count, that's just an issue with consumer chipsets, anything from 3GB up has memory reserved by the chipset so the OS can't see it.