Performance Observation - Am I crazy?

[GW]

I just retired a Pentium 4 2.0ghz with 1 gig of RAM, running XP Home. I now
have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 400 2.1 ghz with 2 gig of RAM, running
Vista Home Premium. I upraded to make photo and movie editing, printing
quicker. The kicker: I have not noticed any material improvement in
performance. In fact, if you consider now, some of my software just does not
work and IE7 is a big pain in the but to run stable, I am sorry I gave up my
old PC. Question: I am missing a performance ajustment? I disabled all the
animiation and other garbage. When does this dual core kick in?

 

[Chuck]

It dosen't kick in unless the applications are written to utilize a dual
core processor.
Meanwhile, many of the applications and windows32 bit version are written
for 32bit processors, so the 64 bit processor is underutilized, even if it
was a single core.