Processor Issues

[Lex]

Recently I decided to check up on my machine. I wanted to check for
conflicts. So I opened MS System Information. Everything was fine...apart
from the first page. On the first page, I have 2 processors listed. So to
check, I went to the Environment Variables and looked at
NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS variable...and sure enough it said there were 2 (oh
dear). My board doesn't even have the capability for dual processor,
nevermind actually having it!

As a final check I went to dxdiag. Once again, I got the report that there
were 2 processors. No new hardware has been installed since I installed
Windows 2000 Pro (quite some time ago) just bits and bobs of new software,
such as firewall updates, service packs etc. Nothing that I would
particularly expect to cause this.

I tried changing the processor environment variable to 1, and then
restarting, but it just came back as 2.

My Sytem:
P4P800D MoBo.
P4 2.6Ghz Processor (800Mhz FSB)
1024MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600SE 128MB Graphics card.

Despite the fact that I have a DVD writer, I'm still reluctant to start over
and re-install windows..so I'm looking for solutions here.

The only case in the device manager where there is more than 1 entry for a
system device is Motherboard Resources where there are 3 entries.

There is processor to AGP controller -2571, and Processor to I/O
Controller -2570 but as far as I know that has been there all the time.

 

[Leonard Severt [MSFT]]

Recently I decided to check up on my machine. I wanted to check for
conflicts. So I opened MS System Information. Everything was
fine...apart from the first page. On the first page, I have 2
processors listed. So to check, I went to the Environment Variables
and looked at NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS variable...and sure enough it said
there were 2 (oh dear). My board doesn't even have the capability for
dual processor, nevermind actually having it!

As a final check I went to dxdiag. Once again, I got the report that
there were 2 processors. No new hardware has been installed since I
installed Windows 2000 Pro (quite some time ago) just bits and bobs of
new software, such as firewall updates, service packs etc. Nothing
that I would particularly expect to cause this.

I tried changing the processor environment variable to 1, and then
restarting, but it just came back as 2.

My Sytem:
P4P800D MoBo.
P4 2.6Ghz Processor (800Mhz FSB)
1024MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600SE 128MB Graphics card.

Despite the fact that I have a DVD writer, I'm still reluctant to
start over and re-install windows..so I'm looking for solutions here.

The only case in the device manager where there is more than 1 entry
for a system device is Motherboard Resources where there are 3
entries.

There is processor to AGP controller -2571, and Processor to I/O
Controller -2570 but as far as I know that has been there all the
time.

You have a Hyperthreading processor. It will be seen as 2 processor.

http://www.intel.com/technology/hyperthread/

Leonard Severt
Microsoft Enterprise Support

 

[Pavel A.]

As Leonard wrote, you have a Hyperthreading processor.
However win2k does not handle HT processors very well.
If you suspect some problem due to this (driver or apps crashes, overheating)
you may want to disable HT in the BIOS.
You won't have to reinstall win2k.

--PA