Question on Programs Running and Processing

So, I'm using my parents' old desktop, and its speed is pretty shite because it's old, and no one has bothered to uninstall the legions of crap it has amassed over the last several years.

My question is: is it easier on the processing to use multiple windows from a single browser, or use two browsers simultaneously and split up the workload? My options for browsing are IE and Firefox. I assume that Firefox is up-to-date on all its shots and I know that IE is.

Better off with one window and more tabs.

With most modern browsers (e.g. chrome, ymmv on other browsers) there's a parent process that hosts certain functionality between tab sessions and each tab is a child process with its own little space to play in.

If you're using two windows you have two instances of the parent process so you're going to be consuming more memory (which is more than likely the bottleneck).

The toll it takes on the CPU is pretty negligible, I don't think the parent process does too much unless a page is active.

Okay so: one browser, one window, many tabs.

Thanks, mate.

threading is more efficient in almost every case.  Since additional processes require more resources for overhead