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XP Home Dual Processor Support (yes again)

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Yes- I know – same old problem again, but so many conflicting answers.

I have an AMD Dual Core processor which XP Home has never recognised even though it was there when the o/s was installed. It’s never mattered but now I do a lot more video editing and Premier Elements 7 prefers a dual core for AVCHD file support.

I’m pretty sure that the motherboard & BIOS are compatible – I did buy the board and processor together.

Both cores appear in the hardware list if you go to System -> Device Manager so something in the o/s is detecting them both, but there’s only one CPU in the Task Manager, no affinity selection option, and programs only detect a single processor.

Didn’t work with SP2, even after applying the hotfix, and doesn’t work with SP3 either (hoped that might have fixed it).

People say XP Home has no support for dual processors – but this isn’t a dual processor it’s a dual core processor, which is very different and I’ve seen screen shots of XP Home Task Manager clearly showing dual CPU resource graphs.

Tried updating AMD drivers, but then if it was a driver problem I wouldn’t expect both cores to appear in the hardware device list. That must mean the HAL is enumerating them both.

Getting fed up and thinking of buying an XP Pro licence out of desperation, I expect that would detect them automatically, and I’d get Remote Desktop.

🙁

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Clarifications

In reply to XP Home Dual Processor Support (yes again)

Clarifications

Question for you…

In reply to XP Home Dual Processor Support (yes again)

Under Device Manager, then Computer, what is listed there?

As far as I know

In reply to XP Home Dual Processor Support (yes again)

And from what the people at M$ have told me about Home it doesn’t support either Dual Processors or Dual Core Processors. It was designed deliberately not to and even if it did show 2 Cores/CPU or Hyper Threading Graphs I’ll bet that one was not working even if the Trace seemed to confirm that it was.

But you are right XP Pro works with Quad Cores and though Vista does it better XP still will drive up to 4 Cores/CPU or whatever you have. It’s useless for any more than that though. 😉

Col

Be careful about Vista

In reply to As far as I know

I have a home computer with 2 Xeon CPUs (both with hyperhtreading, I see 4 CPUs in System Manager). But when I installed Vista Home Premium, it would not use the second CPU. It does support dual core CPUs, just not 2 physical CPUs, and the wording in the marketing hype was unclear. So you have to use the business version of Vista, or Vista Ultimate to use 2 physical CPUs.

What I did was create a second partition and reinstall XP Pro on it, it sees both CPUs, and is better for running my older games anyway. My family uses the Vista partition for general surfing.

James

wow… didnt know that…

In reply to As far as I know

so when bestbuy and Dell or whoever advertise a computer that has a dual core – quad core cpu but runs any kind of home OS your only going to get one core anyways?

Depends on the OS and what if anything the Maker

In reply to wow… didnt know that…

Has done to tweak the OS.

But if you where to look at a i7 Intel I would not recommend using it with anything less that Vista Business or Ultimate. These show as 8 Cores or whatever you want to call them and just are not suitable for anything less on a Windows OS.

Col

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