AMD or Intel?

I have to admit until we got to multi cored CPUs I'd have been able to offer some advice, but I'm just as lost as you now, I too am thinking of upgrading, just a question of cost to power, we could do with a rough guide to the advantages of each type of processor, I wonder if the chips are more suited to different operating systems xp vista linux even ?

Not only CPU makes the performance of a computer system. A cpu with plenty of RAM and good motherboard will boost your performance. AMD and Intel both are good companies and produces good products.Intel is famouls for its stability and availability and AMD is famous for its speed. So dont panic for the CPU(AMD) you have bought. Add at least 8GB of RAM (if your motherboard can handle) and use SSD hard drives and finally add a good graphics card(never rely on the on board or built in graphics card). This will rock your machine for heavy gaming or 3d animation or anything else.

Multi core computers are the near future - 8 cores and counting. Overclocking capability is another subject. Problem at the moment is that you need to buy software that makes use of those multi-cores. New games do but for most of us, that is about all. Most software today just uses a single core and sometimes even runs slower on a quadcore! Frankly, the difference between AMD and Intel is as of nothing compared to running a 64 bit operating system with 4Gb of RAM compared to 16Gb of RAM!! Add in a SSD C: drive with a seek time of under a millisecond compared to a standard SATA hard drive of about 8ms and now you are really talking fast! Next year? That is too far ahead in the PC market.