What kind of multi tasking do you do?

[psychofunk]

Just like the title says, I want to know what kind of multi tasking you do. What do you consider multi tasking to be? I know it is doing more than one thing at once but I want to know if more details like exactly what you are doing. What programs are running. Are you including background tasks in your equation?

[Etacovda]

hrm

dreamweaver, solidworks, photoshop, imageready, flashfxp, winamp, speedfan, refreshlock, trillian/miranda, AVG2 beta....

If im rendering though, im generally not doing anything too intensive (i try not to do two things at once that have high load)

[pHaestus]

At work or at home?
I am a pretty heavy user of radmin at work; I'll usually be logged into my wet chemistry lab's PC controlling the titrators and logged into the PC of my FTIR/FT Raman watching spectra be collected. Then Outlook, Word, Powerpoint are usually open all day too (I'm teaching this semester so I'm always fiddling with notes in Powerpoint). I use Microcal Origin for all my graphing needs and usually I have either WinXAS or Grams/32 open for dealing with x-ray or IR data. Then I have the obligatory suite of firefox, mIRC, and GAIM open for internet and communication. Background tasks include MS activesync for PDA, Sophos corporate av, and all the stuff that makes my notebook work happily, To be able to stay current on all this info I run multiple monitors.

On home PCs I also use Radmin, but they have more modest application loads generally.

[psychofunk]

If you are not really using the program (like outlook, trillian, etc.) does it impact your computer. Are open programs sapping resourses even when not in use? I am trying to figure out if I am really a multi tasker or not. If I am, I will be going Intel if not then AMD64.

[pHaestus]

I don't think it has that much of a difference. I use a 1.7GHz P-M notebook about 16 hours every day (just use my desktops for controlling instruments at work and for gaming/testing at home). I've never noticed any big lag or slowdown.

[Senater_Cache]

photoshop, illustrator, and flash are run all at once every time I do schoolwork.
(they should really come up with a unified program.. I only have 512mb )
on top of that....winamp, AIM, BlackIce, Norton, Mozilla and every 30 mins I fire up outlook.

[9mmCensor]

winamp, a heavily tabbed firefox browser, msn,xchat, and emule never close on my system except for gaming.

when i do school stuff - word, MS Visual Studios C++, Acrobat PDF reader are open as well

all that on 512mbs of ram

[mastermind2004]

MSN, WM, several IE windows, WMP, Eudora, and then a myriad of other apps depending on what I'm doing. Some common additions include 3DSMax5, Photoshop, and Gmax. Otherwise, if I'm "working" it's just a virtual machine with VMWare, running Windows 2000 with Maguma Studios and a couple IE windows open to test and work with PHP. This is on an Athlon 64 with 1gig of Ram. The only time I notice a slowdown is things like rendering in Max or when I hit an infinite loop in PHP.

[Belenar]

If you intend to do a lot of multitasking, adding more RAM will affect performance a lot more than choosing a different processor. And Hyperthreading is only going to help if you run intensive computing tasks simultaneously (and even then it will only help you for a small %).
Make sure you have a shitload of RAM, avoid your OS swapping data to the HD, that's my 0.02€

[psychofunk]

Thanks alot fellas. I was hearing alot of garbage about the subject from what seemed to be a bunch of 14 year olds so I was unsure. Now I know I do very little multi tasking of any signifigance, now you guys on the other hand do some serious multi tasking. Hell you guys actually use your computers...LOL...I think I am sticking right here with my current xbox on steroids ....

[iroc409]

if i'm working, ps/imageready, dreamweaver, several firefox windows, and usually some explorer windows. sometimes flash will be in the mix too, generally some sort of audio work enhancement and outlook, but i usually don't keep outlook open for very long. i guess gaim's usually running too, but that doesn't take up much space. that's generally about the extent of it for now, until i get into more 3d stuff and video editing, in which case i'll probably set up a seperate machine for all that stuff, that way i can render/edit while working on other stuffs as well

[Vector86]

Browsing the web with firefoz across two monitors, writing papers on one monitor while browsing data on the other, gaming on a monitor while accesing game info on the other, dual monitors is teh sh1t!

[Joe]

I have a dual Atlhon 2600+ (2x 2ghz bartons) w/1 GB of ram and a few SCSI drives and 2 LCD monitors.

I do a load of stuff at once. at any given time I may have 10 IE windows, Outlook which has 12 email boxes open, mIRC, Photoshop and/or Adobe Premiere running, trillian, DVD Shrink running (I "archive" DVD's on a daily basis), Ultra Edit with between 10 and 20 docs open, WSFTP, SecureCRT,sometimes a VMware session I use for VPN into work, a couple termininal services windows to servers in my apartment. Windows media player open some of the time, My memory load on the box when nothing special is going on is like 700MB of ram used hehe. The machine just never hiccups, glitches, crashes, or slows down unless I screw something up.

I have been running DVD Shrink while playing Doom3 already with minimal impact on the game. 2x CPU's = 2x the Love