Are Dual-Core Systems worth the Trouble?
Dual-Core Systems are all the range this year, and with good reason. The new darlings in the PC world have two processors, which means that in theory, one processor will run background tasks while the other is free to execute programs such as your Web browser, art program, or newest 3-D game.
The PC boasts an AMD Athlon 64-bit dual-core processor that runs at 2.2GHZ and contains 2GB of RAM. It also contains the Nvidia GeForce video card, a TV tuner, and Windows XP Media Center 2005. That last addition is the one that has caused me the most trouble, but more on that later.
If your system is dual-core and you happen to have a GeForce 6x or &x video card then PSP won’t load properly. Apparently, it,s a driver conflict. It was Nvidia’s fault – when they released driver versions 81.85, 81.87, 81.94, 81.95 and 82.12, they managed to break something. In order to fix it, you have to uninstall the driver and install either v78.01 or beta v82.56. The first option didn’t work for me, but the second one did, and voila – Paint Shop Pro roared to life on my screen. (And I do mean roared – compared to my old 2.0GHZ, 1GB RAM single-core processor system, and the new PC booted PSP8 in no time flat.)
While the Paint Shop Pro problem was unique in that it involved a conflict between the video driver and the dual-core processor, some programs just won’t work well with two CPUs no matter how many drivers you change. There is a workaround to this, and it involves binding the process for a particular program to just one of your two processors.
How do you do this? Open task manager (Control-Alt-Delete,) click the Processes tab, locate the process you’re having problems with, and right-click on it. Select Set Affinity, and unclick CPU 0 or CPU 1 to bind the program to only one processor. You might have to try both to see which one works better for you. From now on, that process will run only on the processor you’ve assigned it. There are programs that will do this for you and monitor the results, but in me experience, going to the task manager route seems to do the job just fine.
Being on the cutting edge of technology means you might bleed a little from time to time, but in the end, once you get everything working in concert with the rest of your system, it’s all worth it.