I'm asking this here, because I trust the opinions of this board more than any other board. I have a dual Athlon MP 1500+ board running with an FSB of 200MHz (266 doesn't want to work). That translates to about 1 GHz for each CPU. I'd never thought I'd say this, but the machine is starting to show it's age. Tasks are taking longer than they should. Programs are taking longer to load, even when everything is defragged.

Unfortnately, there is no clear upgrade path for someone like me, who does several CPU hungry tasks at once at times (i.e. movie encode, and then I play a game to while away the time without eating into the movie encode time). Low cost SMP systems seem to be a thing of the past now, leaving me to ponder whether the Hyper-Threaded P4 is worth it or not. Reading some of the comments in another thread, WinXP doesn't properly utilize Hyper Threading (and Win2k3 is too expensive for me).

What's the best way to proceed for someone who heavily multitasks but can't afford Xeon machines? Hyper-Threading? or should I hold out for something else?

Thanks, any thoughts would be appreciated

Maybe you should get a second machine and make a network with them. You could buy a new fast Athlon and keep using your current one for other time consuming tasks.

Its also great when you try different a OSes.

That's not a bad idea, although it would be my Nth machine that I have sitting around. My #1 CPU sucking task is A/V encoding/DVD Backup, so turning it into a Linux box won't be terribly practical for that anyways. Unless I run a Windows emulator on it.

Hmmm....... Now you've got me thinking. Are there any Linux DVD ripping/encoding options available?

PS - I DO already have a Linux box that's acting as my router for my other machines, but I suppose I could replace that with this machine.