I have an Amd Athlon 64 x2 Dual core 3800+. My question is " How do i Know if the Two processors are workin?

Question

well,, somebody told me about pressing alt+ctrl+del and well, theres the Task manager window,, then go to Processes and right click on a program,, and u can set the affinity to whatever core u want.... but, how do i know if one of them is not doing its job.. and the other one is?

Answer 1

several things:
1st one, is to run c:\windows\system32\taskmgr.exe (or click and hold Ctrl+Shift and hit Esc) and click on the performance tab. if the upper part has two windows side by side, the two cores are recognized alright.
even so, M$ LostDOS may sometime decide that it only wants to see one core; or, in case there is only one graph, above (and the memory graph underneath), go there:
right click on My Computer, click on Properties, click on Advanced and open the Environment Variables; double click on NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS and type in 2;

if after reboot this still didn't help, two possibilites:
-1- BIOS
on (one of) the 1st screen(s), where the PC is listing up its hardware (Power-On Self Test / POST) at the bottom there should be a message, telling you how to access your BIOS; sometimes, motherboards that support dual-core CPUs do have to option to disable the 2nd core.
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IF YOU CAN"T FIND AN OBVIOUS ENTRY (usually under Advanced) DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN YOUR BIOS.
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resetting it to its default settings is possible but not that easy (also requires setting it back to whatever had been tweaked)
some recent BIOSes (for Athlon CPUs) make a backup of the BIOS; should find it in the booklet that came with your PC / motherboard; if not, you're down to opening the case and messing around with jumpers (!)

-2- boot.ini
make a copy of your boot.ini (myboot.ini e.g.) and open boot.ini with notepad; if there are any entries like ONECPU or NUMPROC=1, delete the line(s). those switches may have been added by an installer, so removing may cause the program whose installer added them to stop working. if it was a driver, your windows may not boot anymore; going into safe mode (press F8 a few times after the POST screens is done) will allow you to copy myboot.ini back to boot.ini.

YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY(!)
you can't break your PC doing those, but screw it up pretty badly, doing the wrong thing. if you don't feel like doing it yourself, ask a friend or relative with more experience;
(don't blame me okay?) :-|

PS: which core is busy? download CachemanXP; you can't actually see which process is busy on which core, but it lets you display one icon for each core in the Notification area (where the clock usually is). as many other things, M$es' load balancing is not public, if at all, only programs from computer manufacturer (HP, IBM aso.) will let you see which CPU a program is running on (on their own HW). another thing is, even though Windows XP (and 200x) or vista can use two (up to four, by default) CPUs, very few (windows) programs are actually MULTI-THREADED, thus can split their work over several CPUs. but CachemanXP will let you see which do and which don't ¦-)).

PPS: Super Pi ( ftp://pi.super-computing.org/windows/super_pi.zip ) is **NOT** a multi-threaded program; it only uses ONE CPU, thus will show a system load of 50% even though M$ LostDOS may spread it some over the 2nd core;
if you really want to see both cores at work, you'll have to get yourself BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php ) ; even without taking part in a computation (e.g. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org ) you can still benchmark your system (for free).

Answer 2

Look within the laptop for the mainboard mannequin quantity (when you do not have the motherboard motive force cd), cross to the brands internet website, seem underneath drivers and down load them from there.

Answer 3

In the "performance" tab of the task manager it will display a CPU usage graph for each processor with how hard it is working.

Answer 4

Make life easier, just let the OS manage it.

As long as you are running single threaded applications, only one core will be busy. Try running two Super Pi 32M simultaneously. That should make the 2 cores busy.