With a quad core system, and I have one of the AMD Quadzilla boxes (eat your hearts out), the number of tasks that you are concurrently doing, particularly if you are using Vista (which I?m using right now as my primary platform) isn?t as important as it once was. You can launch a background application and continue to work with little or no impact on what you are doing. Most of the annoying little problems many of us who work our systems hard like slow text (you write a line and then wait for the screen to catch up), email that seems to queue up and wait for some magic command before it goes out and frees up the system so you can do something else, and frame rates in games or while watching a video that suddenly drop because the AV application has started a scan.

Yes, I am wondering why Digital Trends has a 4X4 box.

A reader from our site recently went to a seminar about Windows Vista, when he asked them about the availability of the 64-bit version of the OS he was told that most likely Vista will follow in the footsteps of Windows XP 64-bit, meaning: only available to OEM, not in retail.

By far the most effective form of DEP is hardware-enforced DEP. This relies on having a CPU that supports the NX or XD bit. Modern AMD processors support NX (which stands for No eXecute) while modern Intel CPUs support XD (which stands for eXecute Disable). Both features carry out the same function and differ only in name. If you don't have a CPU that understands NX/XD then you are limited to the inferior software-enforced DEP and you'd have to upgrade the CPU or buy a new PC if you wanted to use hardware-enforced DEP.

The software giant today said making Virtual Server 2005 work with virtualization technologies from both chipmakers' processors will boost interoperability for customers' various systems and improve performance for non-Windows operating systems.

All of which means many users will be forced to upgrade their hardware. AMD's mainstream CPUs are already 64-bit, and by the time Vista ships Intel's main processor lines, both mobile and desktop, will be 64-bit, but that still leaves plenty of folk out there with older system, particularly notebooks, that aren't.