a4-3320m

[zigzag03]

a buddy bought a notebook at local electronics outlet, and after he bought it they told him that the machine, an hp g6 with a4-3320m, had only one core enabled but for extra $ they would "optimize" it and turn on the second core. seems a bit of shady marketing to me, but my question is can i turn on that core for him myself and what utility do i need to do it?

 

[fralexandr]

the a4 3320m is supposed to be dual core... it is really shady, and i'd prefer not to do business with such places.

you shouldn't need any utility to enable both cores
there's likely a bios option for enabling/disabling cores, otherwise i'd be leery of whether or not the notebook actually has an a4 in it.

 

[God Mode]

Total sleaze. Can he reset bios and enable all cores?

 

[podspi]

There are two 'easy' places that cores can be disabled/enabled. One is the BIOS, although I've never seen the option to disable a core on a laptop BIOS.

The other place is 'msconfig' (run as administrator) --> Boot --> Advanced Options --> Number of processors.

If neither of those options work, chances are they've done some sort of registry hack, as there isn't anything easy I can think to do to disable a core. An easy way to figure out if it is just a software hack (in which case, if all else fails, reformat/reinstall) is to boot a Linux LiveCD and see how many cores show up there.

That being said, this place doesn't sound reputable. Unless your friend is getting a good deal, I'd tell them to return the computer, and tell the place why. IMHO it is unacceptable to rip people off like that.

 

[zigzag03]

thanks everyone for the input, i won't likely see the machine before the weekend but i'll post how it worked out. i did suggest the possibility of return but apparently not feasible.

 

[JWade]

There are two 'easy' places that cores can be disabled/enabled. One is the BIOS, although I've never seen the option to disable a core on a laptop BIOS.

while i havent seen anything in a bios to disable cores perse, i have seen in many bios's to ensable/disable multi-core support, so kinda the same thing