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Win7 HP only sees 1 physical proc ?
Hi,
Three days ago I installed Win7 Home Premium on a clean new drive (unallocated space). Oddly, everything went smoothly. My original xp64 pro is on another drive (where it originally was), and upon booting, I am given the choice of which OS to use.
I put antivirus on the Win7 sys, and let MS Update do it's thing(s) so that it would be up to date.
Everything looked to be running well except when I went into Task Manager, it only showed 4 of my 8 processor cores. The system has dual sockets, each with a quad xeon in it. I checked to make sure that Task Manager was set to show each core, and it was (rather than all in one usage frame).
So, I went into Device Manager and it showed all 8 processors. Clicking on them (properties) showed that all 8 are working properly.
On every forum I could find over the past 3 days, I have found other people with these problems too, and fixes for their variety of this problem.
I have checked all of these fixes, and none seem to apply to my machine... They include:
--Selecting the number of procs used to boot with (via msconfig),
--Deleting all the procs listed in Device Manager then rebooting to force a scan,
--Using EasyBCD to set processors to 0, then rebooting,
--Setting the number of processors in the BIOS....
-- and many others.... etc..
These (and other similar fixes) seem only to apply to people with a single socket dual or quad core who have the same symptoms. None of these worked for my dual socket machine.
Then... I came across (only) one post by a Charles T. Waters near the bottom of this page:
HOWTO: Get Windows 7 to detect your new multi-core processor
He stated, "MORE THAN ONE PHYSICAL PROCESSOR, Windows 7 Home Premium will ***NOT*** support it - PERIOD! W7HP will *ONLY* see the 1st processor & the core(s) of that one ONLY!"
He went on to say, "I installed Windows 7 Ultimate and right off the bat, without doing a thing, my machine showed 4 processors, where W7HP only showed 2."
He indicated that this assertion had been verified by someone on the Win7 team. This may be correct, but when I can only find something like this in one place on the internet, it makes me want a second opinion. I couldn't find any official Win7 comparison anywher which would confirm any of this.
Last night, I talked to MS support, and it almost seemed as if they were under some kind of orders to not come out and directly confirm this..... while indicating after all the above mentioned tests that there was a good chance that Win7 Ultimate could solve the problem (I know.... black helicopters ...).
Anyhow, before spending more money to upgrade from Win7 HP to the Ultimate version, I thought I should ask here to independently verify this:
That Win7 HP will only recognize a single socket on your motherboard.
I should add that in efforts (I guess) to sell more hardware, Hewlett Pakard only supports up to Vista on the xw8400..... Although, on the AVID forums (audio stuff), bunches of people seem to be using the xw8400 with win7.
Later today, I may end up asking this question there.
I was hoping that by posting here, one of the brain trust (like Brink, who wrote the great dual boot tutorial) could verify this.
Thanks in advance for any help
edit: I should add that when I boot under xp64 pro (which is on a separate drive), all 8 processors show up (and are working) in both Device Manager and Task Manager.