timwhit
Hairy Aussie
My work computer is an old Dell Optiplex GX270 with a P4 3.2GHz CPU.
Needless to say, whoever set this up was not very bright. Someone added a second hard disk at some point and they never enabled the controller in the BIOS, the hard disk showed up in Windows, but it was running in PIO mode, probably for the last 4 years or so.
Anyways, when I was fixing that I noticed that hyperthreading was disabled in the BIOS, so I thought, why not enable this and maybe I will get a little performance boost. When the system restarted I got a message that Windows XP had installed the new hardware and I need to restart. I restarted and everything came up. I can now see two logical processors in Sysinternals Process Explorer. I haven't noticed a difference in performance yet. Either way, is it really working or does the OS ideally need to be reinstalled for this to actually work? Or am I good to go? If the OS needs to reinstalled, would an inplace install work?
More general questions:
Is there any real performance boost with HT enabled?
Does an application need to be SMP aware to take advantage of HT? The main applications that I run are BEA Weblogic Workshop (based on Eclipse), BEA Weblogic Server, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and MS Office XP.
Needless to say, whoever set this up was not very bright. Someone added a second hard disk at some point and they never enabled the controller in the BIOS, the hard disk showed up in Windows, but it was running in PIO mode, probably for the last 4 years or so.
Anyways, when I was fixing that I noticed that hyperthreading was disabled in the BIOS, so I thought, why not enable this and maybe I will get a little performance boost. When the system restarted I got a message that Windows XP had installed the new hardware and I need to restart. I restarted and everything came up. I can now see two logical processors in Sysinternals Process Explorer. I haven't noticed a difference in performance yet. Either way, is it really working or does the OS ideally need to be reinstalled for this to actually work? Or am I good to go? If the OS needs to reinstalled, would an inplace install work?
More general questions:
Is there any real performance boost with HT enabled?
Does an application need to be SMP aware to take advantage of HT? The main applications that I run are BEA Weblogic Workshop (based on Eclipse), BEA Weblogic Server, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and MS Office XP.