Optomizing quad core use

I was browsing the EVGA forum, and there was a thread someone posted about the OS putting all tasks on one core, regardless of what they were doing. Someone suggested these steps

"Type MSConfig

It should bring a screen with many tabs, go to the one that says Boot.
Go to Advanced Option
Then Check the Tab Processors (it should be grayed out 1)
Choose the amount of cores your CPU can handle: Quad should be 4, Dual should be 2, etc.
Click Apply/Accept Changes
Reboot and you'll be using all the Cores that you CPU has."

And sure enough, when I went to it on my computer, it was just as described



Now, the only people I trust are here, and over at XS, so here I am. Will this actually do anything? Will doing those steps enhance performance?

I'm confident that's just setting how many cores will be used while booting, not how many is used while in the OS. Only one core is needed while booting and that's why 1 core is the default.

JonSimonzi said:

I was browsing the EVGA forum, and there was a thread someone posted about the OS putting all tasks on one core, regardless of what they were doing. Someone suggested these steps

"Type MSConfig

It should bring a screen with many tabs, go to the one that says Boot.
Go to Advanced Option
Then Check the Tab Processors (it should be grayed out 1)
Choose the amount of cores your CPU can handle: Quad should be 4, Dual should be 2, etc.
Click Apply/Accept Changes
Reboot and you'll be using all the Cores that you CPU has."

And sure enough, when I went to it on my computer, it was just as described

Now, the only people I trust are here, and over at XS, so here I am. Will this actually do anything? Will doing those steps enhance performance?

Click to expand...

hrm just checked it out and my windows 7 automatically chose this.

Last time I heard about this, it was used for limiting the number of processors at boot not setting the maximum.

The OS jumps around on cores, otherwise your PC would never use more than 25% CPU usage (you can leave task manager open while you do some stuff on your computer and see that the usage jumps around between all cores)

I really thought it was something like that. Does anybody have a link to something concrete? There is no better feeling that making someone feel like an idiot for spouting off bad advice

Microsoft said:

/numproc=number
This switch sets the number of processors that Windows will run at startup. With this switch, you can force a multiprocessor system to use only the quantity of processors (number) that you specify. This switch can help you troubleshoot performance problems and defective CPUs.

Click to expand...

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833721

Bold in quote is by me