Vista only recognising single core?

Golden Ape · 1 Sep 2007 at 16:21

Afternoon there. I've just been playing with my lovely new (cheap) build and think I have a problem. I'm running Vista Buisiness 32bit on an e1240/asus p5b with 2gb RAM. Due to messing around a bit I've just had to reinstal Vista. All fine so far, except this time round it looks like vista is only recognising a single core. Although both cores show up in device manager when I look at task manager I only get a single graph for processor usage. Similarly CPU-Z says I only have one core.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the case before I had to reinstal the OS. What's going on, how do I get my core back!

Carling · 1 Sep 2007 at 16:23

in task manager view > CPU history...

Make sure its not set to 1 graph, all CPU's.

Golden Ape · 1 Sep 2007 at 16:26

Good idea, sadly it's set to one graph per CPU. That's quite worrying, I really am missing half a CPU.

Golden Ape · 2 Sep 2007 at 11:29

Ah interesting it seems I've fixed the problem. To do so I had to do this: boot with a Linux start disk, then renamed the following files which were found in c:\Windows\System 32 - first renamed hal.dll to xxx_old_hal.dll then replaced it by renaming halmacpi.dll to hal.dll. Rebooted. Magically I now have two working cores! It seems that the wrong hardware abstraction layer (HAL) was installed with Vista, not sure why that would have happened this time round and not the first time.