[Liberator]

Before I start, let me get this said, "Shame on you!  Get your mind outta the gutter!" 

Now, on to business:

I upgraded my processor from an Core 2 Duo 4300 to a C2D 8500 with a brand new install of Windows 7.

My problem is that I didn't install it to the "right" drive.  I meant to go over the existing XP install but instead went over the top of a bunch of apps I haven't used in a while and about half my torrent collection.

So the computer has a dual install of XP/7.  Is there any way to get rid of windows xp without redoing the whole thing again?

[redsniper]

You can just delete the XP partition and then resize the 7 partition to use the newly made 'empty' space, I think. Just make sure you get anything you want off that partition first...

[kode]

C2D 4300 to 8500 doesn't sound like much of a step up at all, though.

[Liberator]

The 4300 is a 1.8ghz and the 8500 is 3.16.

I have something odd happening though, sometimes I hear one of my hard drives spin down with a click like the power cut off.  This PSU is less than 2 years old and nothing is visibly affected and if I browse to the drive it spins back up after a second.  Is this some fancy power management that Windows is doing with my SATA drives that I don't access regularly?

[Admiral LSD]

C2D 4300 to 8500 doesn't sound like much of a step up at all, though.

In addition to the faster clock speed, the 8500 has 3 times the L2 cache, a faster bus speed, and a couple of other bits and pieces (virtualisation mostly) that make it something of a step up, depending on what he paid for it. Price cuts on the newer stuff is making the older stuff less of a value option, but if he was able to pick it up for less than a new i3 then it's not that bad of a deal.

[kode]

C2D 4300 to 8500 doesn't sound like much of a step up at all, though.

In addition to the faster clock speed, the 8500 has 3 times the L2 cache, a faster bus speed, and a couple of other bits and pieces (virtualisation mostly) that make it something of a step up, depending on what he paid for it. Price cuts on the newer stuff is making the older stuff less of a value option, but if he was able to pick it up for less than a new i3 then it's not that bad of a deal.

And it's still just a dual core, but I guess since the whole Core 2 line is being phased out there can be deals to be made on retailers trying to dump old stock, sure.

[Admiral LSD]

Dual core is perfectly fine for most people since a significant chunk of the consumer desktop market just don't do enough heavily multithreaded tasks to justify a quad.

[Liberator]

Well, I'm a WoW player and I use that for my benchmark.

My FPS doubled with shadows on.  Previously, I had to run it without shadows and with the second lowest AA setting.

[kode]

Dual core is perfectly fine for most people since a significant chunk of the consumer desktop market just don't do enough heavily multithreaded tasks to justify a quad.

Yeah, I suppose we can't all use gnu and have adobe flush take one core for itself, or stitch panoramas for that matter.