Anilrgowda

I'm using an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core on this machine, dual booting with Vista Ultimate and XP.
I just added a CPU gadget to the Vista Sidebar to measure Dual-core CPU's. (So it said.)
Here's a snip that shows only CPU-1 active.
http://members.arstechnica.com/x/cfo...U%20Gadget.JPG
Am I really using the dual core capabilities or does a program have to be running that's written for D-C?
Best explanation, (IMHO), gets the points, even a pointer.

Anilrgowda

the x2 sometimes req's you to boot in to the bios to activate the second core even if you dont touch anything its a weird glitch with some motherboards which you may have encountered it does seem to be fixed now so you should be good and by the way to get true dual core processing the application has to be designed for it other wise it just splits the tasks up between the processor's cores most app's and games will take either core but will not actually use them both so it may help a little to have the second core take some task's but you wont notice to much of a diffrence in running single apps or games untill they are made to take advantage of the dual cores and use them both