Technofyed

ok so me and a friend have been thinking over this for about a week now.

he recently read an article about how to "turn on an 'extra' processor that most people didnt know they had."

the problem isnt nessicarily that it doenst work, jsut weather it actually does anything effective, and what to call it.

ok so how you do it:
you open "msconfig" with the run command box.
under boot, you will see advanced options, click it.
somewhere in the opened window it will say, "number of processors"
(it will normally have a "1" somewhere in the corresponding box)
if you check the box and/or click the drop down arrow you will see that you can turn it to a "2".

and this is where the whole argument unfurals. he says that the article said you where turning on an extra processor, but i thikn you are over clocking it (or perhaps doing some ungodly combination of the two)

anyway, i have yet to test it with any actual "tests" but the onyl noticable thing it does is that if you right click "my computer" and go to properties, it will have a second number beside where it displays the processor speed. usually it only displays a copy of the first number, sometimes in (parentheses).

so yeah, what is this and what is it actually doing?

First, please specify the article. Second, what kind of processor do you have? As for mine, all I have under msconfig is a 1 or 2 because I have a dual core processor.

I doubt that manufacturers would be hiding any kind of extra core in their processor (and I'm assuming that you mean core) because of the cost. Not to mention that it hasn't been to long since they had the capability to fit extra cores in one processor. As far as overclocking within windows, it isn't yet designed to do so. Either that has to be done from the BIOS or by a utility written by the MB manufacturer to run on windows because of the low level nature of such a setting. Asus has such a utility for my motherboard for xp.

Overall I would have to say that that is a bunch of BS.

i've tried it on my desktop and laptop, impretty sure they are both dual core and they both have the option of 2. but that what i dont know, he didnt give me the article, or much relevent data from it, so im unsure weather it's splitting(partitioning) data between the two cores, overclocking it(because i do know that you can overclock some processors weather on windows or not). i did think the "extra" processor was a bit farfetched though.

mainly i ask because i wouldnt mind my computer to run faster by turning on an extra core, but i dont want to overclock it because i heard that that can burn out your processor faster.(over heat it, ware it out, or something to that extent.)

i guess i et to do a little google surfing tonight.....(for the article)

[double post]

HAHA! Google!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.asp...-us;833721

so yeah i guess it actually doesnt do much for the actual speed, it just turns on the other core when booting. yay i awnsered my own question

It looked to me to be a way to tell windows how many processors you want it to use on a multlcore and/or multiprocessor system. As for overclocking, again, because of the low level configuration that takes it can only be done by a program written specifically for your motherboard (or in the bios if it has such an option) which is something they haven't yet built into windows.