Hi, I just upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 Home Premium in my virtual box so that the operating system could recognize all of the cpu. My Virtual box setup is a 5 core 1 thread per core setup and XP Pro only sees 2 cores (dual core). Then I upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium and discover I now have 1 core. So I read up about it on the net and discovered Home premium does not support multiple cores. Only multiple threads but I have just the one thread. Then I find out if you want 2 cores to be recognized with it's associated threads then Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate will do the job. But I don't have 2 cores. I have 5 cores each with 1 thread. So when will Microsoft be serious and remove the limitation so that up to 255 cores can be recognized like Linux can. In the end I had to switch to Linux and use the wine emulator for my software. I believe that the 64 bit version of Windows Vista & 7 are really screwed because they are by far more limited then what they should be. For example. The theoretical limitation of 64 bit ram is 2^64 bytes which in gigabytes is ((2^64)/(1024^4)) = about 167771450GB RAM. However Microsoft limits this to 8GB in Windows 7 Home basic and 192GB in Ultimate edition.
The bottom line here is "Is Microsoft trying to force us to upgrade to the next operating system by limiting the possible specs of usage to something below what will be common in 5 years?" What I mean by that is in 3 years computers will have at least 30GB of RAM due to a new IBM RAM chip forcing the customer to upgrade or not use this new technology. So what do you think of Microsofts strategy to forcing us to upgrade?
the worst part is: its working. and they make millions off it.
That means they are very sure of making another $billion in 5 years time. As for Linux they uses latest Intel and AMD sourse code and add it to the kernel. That is why Linux is ahead of Microsoft in a way.
These articles contradict what you are saying:
article1
article2I have a core-duo and Win 7 (Home Premium) and it uses both cores (I have a gadget that tracks usage of everything). Don't know if there is a limit on the number of cores that it will support but it is at least two.
I have just checked those links and still it proves my point with one exception. That is Windows Home Premium supports 2 cores instead of 1 while Home basic and Starter editions support only 1 core. But still that does not allow Windows 7 to read all my 5 cores. Note the difference between cores and threads. There are usually 2 threads in a core but in my case it is one thread in each of the 5 cores. So if for example you have a 2 core processor with two threads then windows will read 4 cores when it is actually 2 cores with two threads each. But anything beyond the 2 cores 2 threads windows will not recognize. And as I said I had 5 cores and 1 thread per core.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions#Comparison_chart
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