I am having one computer disaster after the next. I was only getting 1/8 core activated. Device manager was showing 8 but utilities were only showing one of my FX8350's cores.
A specific core? Which utilities? What did Task Manager have to say about the logical processor count?
Quick look showed about 60% CPU load just streaming video so I was looking at possible fixes.
So far this seems like a case of poor utilities giving out ambiguous information and a generic 'my computer is running slow' problem.
One fix said to disable the number of processors in the advanced boot option menu.
Why... this makes no sense.
I also changed my UAC settings.
UAC has nothing to do with system performance.
Then I went into BIOS and disabled Cool n Quiet.
I can't imagine any reason why this would help. The only reason I'd consider temporarily playing with this setting would be if I noticed that the max processor frequency under load was about a third of what it should be and it wasn't due to a Windows power profile issue (which is a lot more likely than CnQ being the cause).
Is there no USB support in Safe Mode?
There is on Win7, but perhaps you have your mouse and keyboard plugged into USB 3.0 ports? USB 3.0 support on Win7 requires extra drivers, which may be disabled in sleep mode.
Please note: my post is not intended as a put-down or antagonistic in any way, I'm just worried that you're making your life a lot harder by following bad and illogical advice and then trying anything to see if it helps. I have a feeling that there's more to this story than "I disabled some processor cores and now my machine won't boot" as well, there's no reason why Windows would throw a fit because the core count changed, even if it went down to one core. When I was running an AM3 rig on Win7, I had a processor that had two unlockable cores so my system went from 4 to 6 cores and back again many times in its life without any issues.
That fixed it. How and why there's a boot option to limit memory to 256MB is beyond me. So found out how it feels to run Windows 7 with 256MB of memory.
Would you prefer that Windows has less configurability? The likeliest explanation here is that you inadvertently enabled this setting when you were messing with advanced boot properties and limiting the number of logical processors.
ReactOS: I've heard of ReactOS before but I've never used it.