[Still Thinking]

Multithreading also needs some real attention before multiple processor chips is going to mean much to average users. Now they just seem to idle along.

Windows could help with this. I'm running XP Pro on a Phenom Quad, and while you can associate a given app to prefer a given core, by default XP seems to throw everything on Core 1. Manually associating every app with a given core is a stupid idea, first because it takes my man hours instead of Microsoft's, and second, because even if I did go and associate 25% of the things I run with each core, the mix of what I'm running at any given time is always different so from time to time I'd probably end up running all the Core 2 stuff at the same time. Why doesn't XP default to using an unused core if one is available??

[Tarpon]

One of the mysteries of life. You would think that a scheduler that just assigned the next available core to the next process would do something good, but the designs of the OSes were apparently blind-sided by multi-cores.

I have all the Windows, but Vista, after the beta trial, it just took too much to run to recommend it to any client.