this might sound a little vague but can anyone explain what hyperthreading is and/or what it does? thanx!

Hyperthreading is by Intel. It's in their processors and it's so you can multitask at once. It's specifically designed for multitaskers. Personally, I'm not an Intel dude. I perfer AMD, because I have seen many test where AMD outperformed Intel by 33%. I just got an laptop with an AMD processor and it's running like nothing else. You may also want to go to www.intel.com to find out more information about the hyperthreading technology. Zach http://www.protonic.com Fast, Free Technical Support!!!

Before hyperthreading all CPUs had one pipeline to execute programs. To get more pipelines you needed a computer with two or more CPUs. Example are Dell dual and quad Xeon servers and workstations. Pentium 4's and Xeons with hypertheading have two pipelines to execute programs. That means running two programs or threads at the same time. Very few programs can take advantage of this. Some high end video and graphic programs can use this and run faster with hypertheading turned on. The same programs benefit even more with two or more processors. The advantage of hypertheading over two processors is cost. The disadvange of hypertheading over two processors is speed. With hypertheading each pipelne must share the same memory. Even Intel says that hypertheading is at best only 30% faster than one processor without hypertheading. For some applications even a 20-30% preformance boost will be very noticable. There is one disadvange of hypertheading over a single processor without hypertheading. If a program is not using hypertheading then having hypertheading turned on will make the program run a little slower. This is because hypertheading adds an overhead penalty that is only overcome if the program is using hypertheading. For example suppose there is a 2% overhead penality and you are running two programs one at a time: Program 1 does not use hypertheading will run 98% as fast as having hypertheading turned off (98% = 100% - 2%). Program 2 uses hypertheading and gets a 13% boost in performance (13% = 15% - 2%). As you can see, program 1 saw a loss and speed while program 2 saw a net increase in speed.