I just needed to express how impressed I just found myself with how well the linux kernel was working this morning. I was on my AMD X2 3800 processor (dual core, about 2-3? years old) and was simultaneously listening to some tunes on rhythmbox, watching an XVid movie, and browsing the web while emerging ( compiling for those who don’t use Gentoo) on both cores without any noticeable slowdowns in any the realtime activities I was doing!