When my PC is exporting from PPro or AME all the cores are maxed out (as I want it!)

On my laptop all 8 of them hover about the 15-20% mark. I have my OS (Win 7 64x) and apps on the internal SSD and the footage \ project on another internal 500gb 7200 seagate.

The RAM (8GB) is only about 50% in use so has plenty spare.

Any ideas where the bottle neck could be? Exports are slow and I want to use the quad core at its max potential!

In the "performance" tab of the Windows Task Manager, there is a "Resource Monitor" button. This might help you in detecting where the bottleneck is.

Andrew

Hard to say without knowing a lot more details about both systems, but my first guess would be that your PC has a faster HDD subsystem so the CPU doesn't have to wait on it. The CPU can't crunch numbers it is still waiting to receive.