How Much CPU Power Do I Need?

You should have plenty of cpu and memory to handle that.

One thing you can do to selectively increase your power is run msconfig and turn off some of the apps running in the background that you are probably not using anyway.

Click Start / Run / type msconfig and hit the enter key

Select the Startup tab and disable whatever is non-essential for your use.

If you are not sure, Google disable xp startup msconfig and that should get you started.

If the Run command is not showing on the Start menu, right the taskbar and click Properties or Customize and turn on showing the Run command.

Just try it out! Do a practice run and you'll soon know if it's capable

I have one laptop which has a lot less under the hood and it handles these and many other tasks pretty good, so you should be fine.

I use a macbook pro with 4 gb ram, seems to be plenty for light video and audio editing, multi tasking, runs like a beauty, couldn't imagine needing anything faster

RAM is more important than CPU power, and 4GB is more than plenty. You also have a 1.6Ghz Dual Core which is definitely up to the task as long as you keep the processor cool (use a chill pad, 5 Below has them)... reason is defense line 2 when a laptop processor gets hot is to slow it down.

Drawing from my own experience, I had a 3GHz dual core desktop w/ 4GB RAM and there wasn't anything I couldn't do on it. It blew some capacitors on the video circuit and I had to swap.

The next computer was 1.2GHz single core with 2 GB RAM. It was slower when certain processes claimed the CPU (I definitely learned the value of dual core) but aside from that functionality was largely unaffected. However I wanted my dual core back, so..

I now run a 3GHz dual core but only 1GB RAM (unique board, cost prohibitive to upgrade). Now, as long as I don't have several processes running in several profiles, I'm back to before BUT if I run it out of physical RAM (which Firefox can easily do by itself running on 2 accounts simultaneously) it will enter a swap hell and crawl. All the CPU power in the world doesn't matter if you're using the hard drive as spare RAM.

All that, just to say, yeah, you're fine with your laptop.

I'd imagine any moderately-powered computer will suffice. Unless you're running with pro still or video photography or hardcore gaming software, you don't need an ueber-powered computer.

Probably not. The CPU for Toshiba Satellite P105-S6084 is too old. What software do you use to record the video interviews?

no need for a high performance cpu for what you need. good cpu are mostly for games

For what you want to do, just screen capture, your computer is more than good. If you also want to do some light editing, it might get a bit hard, depending on the resolution, but it's still doable, no worries.

CPU and everything else comes into play when you're doing heavy editing, like complex videos that I make, for which I sometimes feel that my quad-core just isn't enough

As I recall, most XP versions only REALLY support 2GB. They have a more expensive version that can handle like 4GB. Of course, the 64bit versions handle more. Other memory is used as cache. The old code was based on compilers based on POSIX standards which only allow 2GB. They then upgraded to support more memory, but CHARGED a premium for it. That is the reason why the 2GB limit showed up so much.

Last I knew, Gmail only supported EMAIL! As I recall, the answer THERE is probably ****NO****, as the files will likely be too large. I don't know if skype does video, but the answer is DEFINITELY dependent based on resolution. The higher the resolution, the more memory and speed you need.

So turn down the resolution so it is reasonable, and lower the sample rate, and you likely WILL be OK. FORGET email for transfers of large files. Gmail might CLAIM you have 7+GB, but that is TOTAL! The limit for each Email is ******FAR****** less! And even if that limit were a million TB, you STILL couldn't do it because it would take forever to send and probably fail. If it didn't, you STILL couldn't send it because most ISPs will reject it. Even if they didn't, the recipients might run out of space. Even if they didn't, they would likely be upset.

And nicholasb's statements don't apply here. For one, the kernel Apple bases its OS on has VM! Windows has a stupid hack and policies they CALL VM which really is a joke. Can YOU say memory leak, assert(aka BLUE SCREEN, AKA BSOD), low disk space, excess swapping, etc? EVEN the VMS "engineers" they hired couldn't clean it up!

Steve