The Real Test - AnandTech's Multitasking Scenarios

Shortly after receiving the dual core system from Intel, I posted a question in my blog asking AnandTech readers to respond with how they multitask.  I kept the question pretty open-ended, just wanting to get a feel for all the different types of multitasking that this sample of AnandTech readers did on a daily basis.  I then took the data and did my best to, in the limited time that I had, model some real world multitasking benchmarks based on the responses.  The results are three real world, multitasking benchmarks with the promise of more to come. 

The biggest commonality between responses was that AnandTech reader systems, much like my own, are loaded with applications running in the background.  So, the first thing that I did to put together our multitasking testbed was to put a ton of applications on it, the type that we all use. I came up with the following list:

Daemon Tools
Norton AntiVirus 2004 (with latest updates)
Firefox 1.02
DVD Shrink 3.2
Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1.0
Newsleecher 2.0
Visual Studio .NET 2003
Macromedia Flash Player 7
Adobe Photoshop CS
Microsoft Office 2003
3ds max 7
iTunes 4.7.1
Trillian 3.1
DivX 5.2.1
AutoGK 1.60
Norton Ghost 2003
Adobe Reader 7

What's important about that list is that a handful of those programs were running in the background at all times, primarily Microsoft's AntiSpyware Beta and Norton AntiVirus 2004.  Both the AntiSpyware Beta and NAV 2004 were running with their real time protection modes enabled, to make things even more real world. 

With my system fully configured, I did what anyone else would do with a brand new system - I used it.  I used it as an actual system doing real world everyday tasks and made notes of my impressions, then came the interesting part - I swapped out processors for a single core non-HT enabled Pentium 4 and started making notes of differences.  Armed with the single core chip, I went to task on creating benchmarks based on some of the tasks that AnandTech readers did on a regular basis (not too surprising, I use my system in a very similar way to most AT readers).  So let's get to the tests...