Must-Have Dual Core Applications?

[rvacha]

Mods- I hope that this is the proper forum given that the T60 is the first dual core product, but perhaps it should be moved to Thinkpad General?

What dual core/dual processor apps do the members recommend? I know that Windows media encoders already offer dual processor support (and they fly!) and I have been running WinRAR 3.6 beta 4 with nice results, but what else is on your must-have list? Apps, utilities, encoder/decoders, whatever?

[christopher_wolf]

Besides those? Not much else.

If you want to go into certain areas, like media editing. I can recommend the latest version of Adboe Photoshop and Premeire; those of a technical nature will like the mobile performance that can be obtained from programs such as MATLAB, Mathematica, and Maple. The performance of such applications on dual core Intel chipsets has certainly increased, only noticiably faster if you have a large model or simulation going, though. I haven't tried out the latest CAD programs on the Intel dual cores so I can't say how much of an improvement they will exhibit.

As for stuff like Word? Well, I can say Word isn't going to care much at all about *how* many processors it can use. Excel might improve more, but that just means taking the cursor to the bottom of the screen will get you to 65556 lines much faster.