Hi everyone,
i stumbled across this forum while searching Google, had a bit of a read, appears very good from what ive read. Ive been in to computer hardware for a few years now but only recently i built my first rig. It has an Intel Q9550 cpu, Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4 motherboard, 4Gb Corsaire dominator PC-8500 (1066MHz) ram, Sapphire Radeon HD4870X2 video card, Antec TruePower Quattro 850W, Case is Antec1200, 750Gb HDD, running Vista Home Premium 64bit.

I have a couple of questions that have stumped me.... 1) how do i check if vista has actually detected the 4 cpu cores??? When i go into Device Manager it has 4 cpu's but it says "UKNOWN DEVICE". I installed the latest Intel CPU ID tool, but that tells me that my CPU was released after the software so it cant detect my CPU clock. I want to make sure that vista is running my computer off 4 cpu cores. Was there anyother driver i was supposed to install???

2) ive had some compatability issues already with vista home premium 64bit... the ATI catalyst software doesnt run particularly well with it-!!! My video card came with Catalyst 8.5, i upgraded to 8.9, EVERYTHING lagged! So back to 8.5 i went- im still getting the occational black screen when i log in, but thats easily fixed.
My quesiton is, do you think that i should just format my machine and go back to Windows XP 32bit??? Or should i stick with vista??

Shane_vt87,

We hope you enjoy the forum. There is so much to read and learn here.

This is the Meet and Greet forum, so I would suggest you post your query into the Microsoft Windows forum to obtain the very best of replies for the remainder of your post.

kind regards,