Can an Intel dual core processor operate with one dead core?

RudeCurve

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I recently purchased a Pentium Dual Core processor and after using it for a couple of days it seems one of the cores has died? In Task Manager there is only one graph vs dual graphs as before. Also in CPU-Z and Hardware Monitor it only lists one core now vs two before.
 
Highly unlikely.

Have you updated or reset your BIOS recently, perhaps? Chances are the SMP support has been disabled.
 
I haven't touched anything in the BIOS. I'm getting a free replacement so I'll find out next week. It's just weird that all the programs are reporting only one working core. Could a driver in the OS disable one of the cores?
 
could it be possible xp (it is xp is it ?) has somehow reverted to a different hal ?
i dont know how you'd check

device manager -- system -- microsoft acpi compliant system



i think there is also a setting in boot.ini to make the o/s only see a single core i cant remember what it is though
 
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I haven't touched anything in the BIOS. I'm getting a free replacement so I'll find out next week. It's just weird that all the programs are reporting only one working core. Could a driver in the OS disable one of the cores?

Have you *checked* the BIOS? Just because you haven't changed something doesn't mean nothing has changed ;)

Reverting to the uniprocessor HAL would be the other possibility, though I'm not sure what could trigger that (other than SMP being disabled in the BIOS).
 
Yeah I checked the BIOS and multiprocessor is enabled. In device manager I don't see ACPI Uniprocessor PC instead I see Standard PC.
 
Where in device manager do you see this, precisely? You need to check under the "computer" heading (probably the first entry in the list of devices). If your HAL has reverted to the uniprocessor mode, it will say "ACPI uniprocessor PC". If this is the case, you can try to force it to use the multiprocessor HAL by updating the driver for this device (or doing an XP repair install from disk, but that takes longer and you'll have to re-do Windows Updates).

The procedure to update the HAL is listed here.
 
The Standard PC is right where the ACPI Uniprocessor should be under Computer. Anyway I reinstalled XP and it's working now thanks for the help.
 
Yeah I think its HAL related. I think XP is not smart enough to load up a different HAL if you just upgrade the CPU from a single to a dual or from a dual to a quad or from single to a quad. I think a reinstall would be necessary. Also I think if I remember right that if you were using AMD processors theres some driver one has to install too to allow for the SMP glitches to be sorted out.
 
Yeah I think its HAL related. I think XP is not smart enough to load up a different HAL if you just upgrade the CPU from a single to a dual or from a dual to a quad or from single to a quad. I think a reinstall would be necessary. Also I think if I remember right that if you were using AMD processors theres some driver one has to install too to allow for the SMP glitches to be sorted out.
XP will change from a single core HAL (ACPI uniprocessor at least) to the multiprocessor one automatically. (Though it wont "downgrade" if you change from a multicore to a single core. You can make use of this when deploying OS images, since you only need the single core HAL images.)

Sounds like XP somehow thought it couldn't use the ACPI HAL in this case.
 
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