MBP Core Usage

Hello all

I've just received a new 15" MacBook Pro (2.2Ghz i7, etc etc) and pimped it up with 8GB RAM and a shiny 240GB OCZ SSD.

I have been using it most of yesterday evening, and wanted to ask a couple of questions to like minded MBP owners...

1) mbs is Spotlight? It went mad after I migrated all my stuff over. It's calmed down now though. I take it this is normal??

2) More importantly though, when checking what was going on with my CPU usage, I was surprised to notice that, at first, the activity monitor showed two cores. After much heat and noise from the MBP, the activity monitor showed 1 core...! There is only one column on the application's thumbnail and only one graph on the application itself.

I'm used to having two columns all the time (from my old late 2008 MBP). Is this normal???

I know I don't want to use two cores all the time, which would be impractical, but I don't want it to be limited like that all the time! Would be very annoying for all the photo editing I do...

Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks for the quick response. Perfect answers.