basically lets you run more simultaneous applications at once. So if you're one of those households (like mine) that have a 15 year old girl running 8 IE windows, messenger programs, photoshop, word, all at once, a multi-core processor would work well for you. And a huge amount of ram (This 2GB would be more than enough). If you're interested in gaming, I don't believe that this would really have any noticeable advantage over a single core of the same speed.