How can I perform certain programs better on a quad core?

Question

I have a 2.4Ghz Quad Core, and it works great and fast, though now I've started using Fireworks and Photoshop, and every time i use the brush or eraser tool, the program greatly slows down to the point that i can't accurately use these tools anymore (great amount of lag).

I've used the same programs on my other computer, which is a 3.0Ghz (one core), and it works OK. I am guessing if its because these kinds of programs only use one of my four cores (which would only get 2.4Ghz as opposed to 2.4Ghz x2 oe x4).

Is there a way of improving the performance of these programs?

Answer 1

Quad Cores are generally meant for multithreaded applications, like Shredder Chess, games (most games nowadays are multithreaded), QuickPIE (for calculating PIE) and others.. or running 2 or more applications like encoding in DivX and also compressing a ,say, 400 MB file.

The reason why the application is performing slower because the application is not using multiple threads to work on. Multithreading is not an issue of processors but the issue of the software. Good softwares where large processing has to be done use multithreading like QuickPIE uses all the cores of the  Quad Core CPU to run at 9.6 GHz.

But NOTE! that if you run the same single threaded application in a computer that has 2 processors installed then the application will perform 2 times (or even more) faster!

Answer 2

no ways

only if their developers will fix the code

Answer 3

If they do not have full multi-processor support you can do nothing about this.