I was ready to give my old computer an upgrade to the new operating system - Windows 7.
I tried Vista 7 - couldn't take it - and continued on with the XP Professional for another 2 years. The buzz is about IT roll out plan for Windows 7; to me, it is a message for me to learn Windows 7.
The special offer, $150, provided 3-user license for upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium. I thought it was a good deal!
I upgraded my Thinkpad T61 (Core2Duo, T7300 2.0GHz) to Windows 7 Premium 64-bit. It works ok, many of the hardware are still hard to find, still having many unresolved "!" "?" on many devices.
The next PC in line is a IBM Intellistation Pro Z. Yes it's old, but the benchmark performance on the Dual Xeon (P4) setup is still pretty good. I was counting on the 5x500gb SATA in RAID to pull ahead. Spent hours and hours trying to figure out why Windows device managers shows 4 CPU while the perfomance monitor shows 2 CPU history. Why?
After googling for many hours, and many of my own testing
Windows 7 Home Premium supports
1 physical CPU with multi-cores.
Windows 7 Home Ultimate & Professional support.
2 physical CPU with multi-cores
More googling from a foreign website, it confirm my greatest disappointment.
# # #
From the BIO setup, I turned off HyperThreads function
Device manager sees 2 CPU, MSCONFIG & Performance monitor shows 1 CPU Usage History
From the BIO setup, I enabled HT function
Device managers sees 4 CPU, MSCONFIG & Performance monitor shows 2 CPU Usage History
I unplugged one of the CPU, leaving it with just 1 CPU, with HT function enabled
Device manager sees 2 CPU, MSCONFIG & Performance monitor shows 2 CPU Usage History
The biggest bummer of all - it going to cost $200 to upgrade to Ultimate version 7 if I want to see both of XEON processor at work!
There are fewer dual or multiple Processor, MP systems on the market, the trend is toward 1 cpu-multiple cores.