Vista X64 maxing out one core.

[Stone Fox]

I have a machine at work running Vista X64 with an E4500 proc.

Most of the time it seems to be running the first core at almost full whack and barely touching the second core which seems to make the machine sluggish and unresponsive at best, and occasionally un-stable / un-usable at worst!

Anyone got any thoughts or suggestions please? I've tried scroogling it but to no avail.... :(

(Board GA-945PL-S3P)

[TechZeal]

Stupid question but I'll ask anyway... is the option set in BIOS for multi-core processing? It sounds as though it's ignoring the second core.

[internetshop]

thank you for posting the inquiry Toby (stone fox) but i have got a working solution.

btw. the BIOS setting were set to enable multi core processing.

Mad Boris provided a wonderful work around in the form of the core maximizer for SupCom.

now both cores are behaving them selves and my idle threats of licking the CPU before earthing myself are no longer warranted

chears dude[s]

[TechZeal]

Could you add a little more detail to either the problem, solution or both? This sounds really interesting and the solution is just as curious. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Stone Fox]

It's something I've seen a couple of times before, I don't know whether it relates to a flakey install of Vista, or compatibility issues with some hardware.

Symptoms:

Long PC startup times
erratic performance
One core on a dual or quad running at 100% while the others are barely hitting 5%

Interestingly enough, thinking about it, I've only seen it with Vista64, and specifically after SP1.

I would fire up task manager and sort by CPU usuage but I've got a feeling it'll be either explorer, system idle process or svchost.exe doing it. Oh, that and the issues been resolved now.

Solutions:

In the course of various scroogle searches I've encountered many suggestions. The most prevalent was doing a FULL format and re-install. Allegedly the problem only occurs when you use quick format, but this sounds kinda silly to me so I didn't bother trying.

Use the mad boris core optimiser that was designed for SupCom. Resolves the issue nicely.