I ask since I see the new AMD Phenom processors however about 98% of my programs don't even use dual cores so I wonder what the point in getting a quad core is. The only two programs that take advantage of dual cores are two FPS games but none of my work software does.

No reason to get a quad core yet unless you do some heavy picture, video rendering or any heavy 3D rendering.

See that is the thing though if the program doesn't support multiple cores there is really no speed increase at all. When I went from an Athlon (darn I forgot the model but it was one of the highest althon models) to an AMD 3700 X2 the speed was exactly the same since the CPUs were both at 2.2ghz. Plus sometimes programs like FL Studio and Dreamweaver would crash so I had to set the affinity to 1 core for it to work.

When it deals with single core apps then no there is no diff between say a X2 4400+ and a 3700+. Mass Quad Core support is still a good 2 1/2 to 3 years away. I mean it's just now that dual core support is starting to become main stream for programs and Dual Cores have been around since Q2 of 2005. By the time you need a Quad Core for main steam programs they will be much cheaper and much more faster then the ones coming out now. It would be like comparing the first dual core Pentuim D 8xx series to the latest Core 2 Duo 6x50 series.

Multi core support is slowly gaining ground. DixX encoders, Photoshop and many multimedia software can use multiple processors (logical / physical). But how much of these apps would you use on an everyday basis? It's not worth spending money for speeding up an occasional task. Stick to your dual core for now and save for the future or get more RAM or a better video card now if you are into gaming. With games, unless you have the top end cards, the CPU is seldom the limitation. Kailas Shastry