I just bought myself a new P4 2.80 Ghz (HyperThreading) with 512 MB DDR 400 Ram (on a single stick) running Windows XP Professional. My mother board is Intel D865-GBF. I invested in a Seagate SATA 80 GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk.

1. How do I know if HyperThreading is working? It would really help if someone could please upload a snapshot of how it looks on their system.

2. How do I know if I am getting the benefit of the additional speed of SATA? Anyways, what is the differnece between a Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200 and a SATA 7200?

3. How do i know if my installed DDR RAM is indeed having a speed of 400 Mhz and not 266 Mhz?

I need to know these answers within the next 24 hours because I have the option of changing the installed parts during this time. So please help me. I know computers fairly well and have been comfortably using Win98SE previously for many years. I am feeling a bit lost in Windows XP Pro on my first day.

Oh... I forgot asking the fourth question:

4. What would be the ideal number of partitions to have on my 80 GB HDD? Should I reformat using NTFS or FAT32? At present I have four partitions (20 GB each) formatted with FAT32? Would there be any benefits in repartitioning or reformating?

Try CPU-Z,

http://www.cpuid.com/

It should tell you what you need to know about your memory I think, if not, try Belarc Advisor

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

As for hyper threading, look in your BIOS, either in Standard or Advanced (I forget, look through the menus till you find it), there should be an option called

Hyper-Threading:

and it should read Enabled.

BTW, I always format my desktops with NTFS, read the link below to find which is right for you

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/columns/russel/october01.asp

NTFS in my opinion is very very very forgiving. FAT32 was grand but if you had the power go out or something you always had that stupid scan disk. NTFS is better in my opinion for the average user.

If you are going to use it for gaming their are diffrent ways you can gain performance with raid and FAT32 (don't remember what it is off hand) or NTFS if you disable the Indexing service in XP.

Have you made sure your mother board supports Hyper-Threading?

Another way to check if it is working is when you go into task manager and look at performance you should see two CPU Usage History Graphs. (Because that is how it is by defualt in XP). If not do a view > CPU History > if two options don't dispaly then your Hyper-Threading is not enabled :p

FatalSw1tch:

Under CPU Usage History is do see two graphs... one on the left and the other on the right! But then again the graphs almost always look pretty much the same i.e. very little variation between them!

so that means i have HyperThreading, right?


interneat:

thanks for the links. i am visiting them now.

If you are thinking about ever dual booting into Linux:

20-30 GB System and Applications on NTFS
30-50 GB Data Fat32 (Linux don't do NTFS so well)
10-20 GB Ext3 for Linux

but thats just me ;)

NTFS, aqllows true password protection to hide all your porn ;)

and what if i ever forget my password??!!! is it unhackable?!!! :D

Ambirex I'm ashamed.... your supposed to have a dedicated machine for linux.

Officer pretty much unless you want to spend big bucks.

and here is what hyperthreading looks like in task manager. see attached file

FatalSw1tch:

Thanks for uploading the image. It removed all doubt on the matter at one shot!

Would you also happen to know the answers to my questions 2 & 3 above?

Thanks so much for your assistance. I need to know the answers within 24 hour time-frame so that I may be able to change any of the parts without cost.