>In contrast, on the Pentium D 915, your app would get at most 2.80GHz because it can't take advantage of more than 1 core. Of course, you could run 2 copies of your app ;)
>
>This scenario is a bit artificial; in practice, you'd probably upgrade to a Core 2 Duo, which gets large gains even at lower clock speeds because it's more efficient - does more work per clock cycle.

Haven't tried this yet - still haven't installed any of my apps on the laptop, which has this double-headed dragon inside - so this is also a mental experiment: if I had a queued part of the application, which would perform tedious tasks for the primary part, and this queue app would be a separate exe, then they'd be each playing in their own sandboxes, wouldn't they?

Is there some special switch when running ShellExecute() to tell the OS to fire it in the other core (if available), or should I rely on the OS being smart enough to do so automagically?