Strange goings on-----

[jimmyj68]

I recently purchased and installed a Dragon Naturally Home program. A few days later the program opened and warned me I was running a single processor CPU and the program may not operate efficiently. My response initially was ---what??? I'm running a quad core I5 processor. Rebooted and restarted the program and Dragon hollered again. Reinstalled Dragon and the same thing happened. Went to dragon forums and found I was not the only one experiencing this problem. Dragon was claiming innocence.

Reading through the forum a user responded that he had fixed the problem by going to control panel and device manager and uninstalling his processor. On reboot, Dragon was happy.

Thinking back, I remembered I thought my Win8 was getting very sluggish - putting two and two together I realized that Dragon reported a single processor when the system was sluggish. Doing the processor uninstall and restart cured both issues. Have since determined that if I turn my system off completely- it would start up with only a single core activated. Reinstall fixed it. What's going on with my Win8???

 

[Savatar]

I suspect that it's probably some power management setting somewhere, companies are really trying to do all they can to save a watt. You might want to try setting it to 'maximum performance' in the control panel's power options and disable some of the power management features in BIOS (just for testing). Many of these features dynamically lower/increase the clock speed of the processor.

If you notice it happening again, can you open task manager and go to the performance tab, select CPU, and see what it says for 'Cores' and 'Logical Processors' near the bottom of that display? If it's a quad core it should say 4 cores (or 8 logical processors if you happen to have a version which supports hyper-threading). If that displays properly, and it still errors even with power management features disabled, then I would suspect it's a problem with the software... maybe screenshot that alongside the error message and see if their support staff can help.

Edit: Also, you can check the program in task manager > details > right-click on the process > go to 'set affinity' and ensure that it has all cores checked (a process will only be able to use cores that is set there).

 

[jimmyj68]

Thanks Savatar - I was thinking what you outlined but felt sure all those settings were ok - didn't check them- I will now.

 

[jimmyj68]

Following up on Savatar's suggestions, I was poking around in the bios on my Biostar HI-Fi Z77X board and accidently closed the bios with the ignore all changes and reset button.
Immediate result? No video at all. I was using HDMI and the PEG of GTX 650. The default bios is for the internal video from the Intel processor. As you know, you are lost when you can't have video. My ASUS monitor would not come to life so I couldn't reset it from HDMI to DVI - so there I was with a purring away computer and nothing to see to adjust and cure the loss of video problem. Thought maybe removing the HDMI and connecting a DVI cable would work - but ASUS was looking for HDMI so no such video luck.

Finally decided reluctantly (?) to reset the CMOS on the board. After doing that I was able to get video again but it was from HDMI, discovered the board has dual outputs of DVI and HDMI for use with two monitors. So I would have been able to get video from either HDMI or DVI - internally or with the PEG since the board would default to PEG if PEG is installed.

But this is a operating system forum, and this is what I want to report.

After going into bios and setting it up for the things I wanted like disabling the Intel stuff that decides how many cores you will use depending on load, rebooted and WIN8 would not post. On the third try a window came up saying that errors had been found and WIN8 was going to attempt to repair itself. OK???? after about 5 minutes of looking at a window that I guess was busy repairing it gave me a window with some more statements about repairs and just sat there. I finally rebooted after turning the system off completely. It booted and posted to my sign in window in about 15 seconds and has been working like a house afire ever since.

Question, how closely is WIN 8 tied to your bios settings? All I did was reset CMOS and apparently WIN 8 saw the change. And then reset itself to match the new BIOS settings (I did install a new bios a few weeks back but didn't go through the requested BIOS reset the bios install asked for because the bios indicated it was the latest version). It seems my reset of the CMOS was the actual bios change and WIN 8 had to "fix" itself to use the new motherboard parameters. Is that possible? And if it is, then my plans to lift out the Ivy Bridge motherboard and processor and just drop in a Haswell motherboard and processor will probably work because WIN8 will see the change and "repair" itself.

 

[lif_andi]

You'd do well to research well before moving your OS install to another system. This requires some preparation or it will not work. As for the rest of your post, you should research what the BIOS actually does and how your system depends on it.

 

[Ketchup]

When you reset the BIOS, you most likely enabled some things that were disabled/ disabled some things that were enabled, because the reset. It may have also changed the AHCI settings, which would affect how Windows sees your system.

In other words, Welcome with Windows 8 and AHCI!