Dual core processor

Software WxSim
1

Hi Tom,
do Wxsim and Wxsimate take advantage of the power of dual core processor?
I’d like to install Weather Display, Wxsim, Wxsimate, server (Easyphp or Xampp) and a home surveillance software on the same computer.
So far, I have all of them working on one cpu except Wxsim and Wxsimate.
This question because I would consider buying a new computer with dual core if that helps.
Thanks.

2

Highly doubt it on the Dual Core processor…

The other issue is that most most surveillance software packages are normally designed for whole screen use. Many of them provide 4, 8 or more camera views on a monitor and are not really designed to share with other applications. Many of them are setup to provide time lapse save to disk features too and need large hard drives to work properly.

That has been my experience using Swann and several other surveillance packages.

3

Depends what you mean by “take advantage of”. That’s normally used to refer to programs that can use both CPUs simultaneously, in order to get the slowest processing time for some particularly CPU intensive activity - image manipulation and video generation are examples of that. I’d assume you don’t want that, but instead want to ensure that your 4 or 5 programs share the 2 CPUs, so that one program doesn’t hog the CPU and stop the others from working. XP Pro and similar operating systems do this for you automatically, and my experience when I had a dual processor machine was that programs were more responsive when others were hogging the CPU.

You can also take advantage of “Processor Affinity” to allocate processes to different processors. There’s quite a bit of documentation about this on the web.

HTH

4

Thanks Phil. Does Windows 2000 professional also take care of those dual core cpu?
He krelvinaz. My homesurveillance software has a dedicated pci card (Cybereyes) with 4 video inputs and on 3 years with only 2 inputs connected used 20.6 gigabytes. Depends on configuration.
:smiley:

5
oes Windows 2000 professional also take care of those dual core cpu?
Windows 2000 does - by default you just install s/w as you'd normally do, and Win2K will look after load balancing and threading onto the two processors. Therer is a lot of tweaking you can do, as implied by [i]Phil Holmes[/i], however you can get by quite happily on defaults in most situations.

I use an ‘old’ (6+ years I think) dual processor Evans & Sutherland industrial server PC running Win2k. The specs. are pretty low by today’s standards (2 x PIII 100s, 256mB RAM), however it is blisteringly fast - even by today’s standards. It still loads Win2K faster than any machine I’ve seen.

Rgds

6

Thanks EI4HQ in Cork, Ireland