Dual Core, Vista, XP, One Core Supported, I'm so confused!!

brycematheson712

brycematheson712

New Member
OKay, I'm not too new to the PC Building community, but recently something new popped up with the release of Windows Vista.

I just ordered some parts off Tiger Direct. I bought a Dual-Core AMD FX-60 Socket 939 CPU. With the new release of Windows Vista, they gave me a free issue of Home Premium. Now, I've kind of got a hard decision. This is my first dual-core PC build and I'm not sure about which OS to choose.

I've heard that Vista is a load of crap at this point, so I don't really feel comfortable with loading that unless I start hearing some good things about it. I know that Windows XP Proffesional provides support for Dual-Core CPUs.

My main problem now is that I only have XP Home, or Vista Home Premium and I would like to take full advantage of the Dual-Core capabilities. Do you know if Service Pack 2 provides Dual-Core support to XP Home systems? I've always loved Windows XP and it's hard to part with it.

So, what's my best option? If possible, I would like to stay as far away from Vista, but I'd like to take advantage of the Dual-Core capabilities of my new build. What do you think?

Thanks for the help!
 
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I currently have XP Home on the primary ide drive, Vista Home Premium on the second ide drive, and XP Pro on a new sata drive just added in. All three have been great on the Asus board with 2gb of value ram and an AMD64 3500+ single core cpu. I've been waiting for either the Opteron 195 or FX-60 to come down in price to max out the board here a little with a dual core model. I will easily run the dual core model eventually installed with all three versions of Windows.

Now for installing Vista on a sata drive you will no longer need a driver floppy since the newer version contains it's own larger driver base and readily detect hardwares better. The newer features seen in VIsta are more of a drawback like the user account control that acts like a firewall in addition to the default firewall where you are prompted even to allow a game to run! That along with the Windows Defender and new sidebar seen on the desktop plus reorganization and change of appearance from icons to sentences with links are the main annoyances so far.
 
They most support dual-cores, and right now you can pretty much use whatever you want. XP might be the best choice now because you're more firmilar with it, and you know that everything works with it.

However Vista is quickly becoming a standard as well, and pretty much everyone has drivers and apps for it.
 
XP home will run a Dual Core fine. I think there was a issue with XP home vs. XP Pro running a Dual processor setup. Think XP Home did not support Dual Processors at first like XP Pro but I think that was even fixed with SP2. But it will run a dual core as well as XP Pro.
 
brycematheson712 said:
Is there any actual quoted proof of this ^^^? Like, is there somewhere in the SP2 fixes that I can read to find out? Thanks!
Click to expand...

As far as I know, XP Home still doesnt support multiple processors. All it supports is one processor, but can have multiple cores.
 
Home, Pro and Vista will support your FX-60 just fine. I'm running Home on my desktop with my 4400+ dual core and Vista on my new HP laptop. If i was to buy new OS for my desktop, i would get Vista. So far i haven't had any OS problems on my laptop that would turn me away from Vista.
 
[-0MEGA-];588344 said:
As far as I know, XP Home still doesnt support multiple processors. All it supports is one processor, but can have multiple cores.
Click to expand...

I think your right


While Windows XP Home does not support more than one physical processor, there's a lot of confusion about whether or not it supports multiple processor cores in a single physical processor. This is implemented in several ways, of which the most widely used is Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. Also, AMD is currently rolling out a series of 64-bit processors called the X2 dual core series, which features two processor cores per die.
How much of this is supported? The answer is all of it -- in XP Professional, and, surprisingly enough, in XP Home as well. If you install XP Home on a system that has a single processor with dual cores or hyper-threading (what is referred to as two logical processors—XP Home will recognize both of them, and will install the appropriate Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to work with it.
However, if you have more than one physical processor (such as two dual-core or Hyper-Threading processors), XP Home will only recognize the first one. Note: If you enable hyper-threading on a machine on which Windows is already installed, the HAL will be automatically upgraded (if it hasn't been already) and you'll be prompted to reboot a second time to finalize those changes. Microsoft's official word about multiple processors across all its products is that they are licensed by physical processor socket, not by the number of cores on each processor. For instance, if you buy a single-CPU license for SQL Server 2005, that license is valid no matter how many cores are in that one CPU. Likewise, Windows XP Home will only work with one socket at a time regardless of its cores or threading potential, and XP Professional will recognize up to two sockets
 
Haha. That's good news!! I think that I'll go ahead and load Windows Vista Home Premium on the system initially just to see how it performs and to get used to the new interface. If I decide that's it's not stable enough, I'll replace it with XP Home and then ship it off to the person who has purchased it.

Thanks for your help guys!
 
When the dual core models were first introduced both versions of XP were seeing problems prior to SP2. An older MS fix for multiple cpu boards was then applied as a fix for systems running dual core models seeing performance losses. This was a special edit of the system registry. Later AMD came out with it's own special patch you can download.
 
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