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Enable Hyperthreading after upgrading motherboard | Mindful Musings

Submitted by cahn on 20 August, 2005 - 1:35am

Reproduction from Mark Ghosh's site:

1) Download and install Windows XP Service Pack 2

2) Find the following files (normally in your c:\windows\servicepackfiles)
- ntkrnlmp.exe
- halmacpi.dll
and copy them to your c:\windows\system32 folder. (This is considering your new motherboard has ACPI support. I know that these files will support non-ACPI computers as well, but that has not been tested)

3) Open up boot.ini in your text editor and find the following line:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn (or something of this sort)

and replace that line with:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="XP Professional MP" /fastdetect /kernel=ntkrnlmp.exe /hal=halmacpi.dll

Make sure there are no line breaks in that line. (backup your boot.ini and your hardware profile if you want, that might be a good idea)

Now reboot, go through the installation and reboot of the new kernel and you are done. To test that you have SMP or hyperthreading enabled, hit ctrl-alt-del and task manager to see two seperate graphs for the processors.

Read the full text from Mark Ghosh

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What did I say then?

Now we have a PowerPoint alternative

Submitted by cahn on 12 March, 2006 - 10:18am
I remember Richard MacManus of ZDNet saying there are no credible alternatives to PowerPoint on the web yet. That might change with Thumbstacks. Its sample presentation explains that it does not yet have the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, but anyone working a lot with PowerPoint knows those are actually distractions they would rather avoid. Most important is the ease of creating a presentation that delivers its message well and the ease of sharing it with other people (without any nasty surprises), and Thumbstacks could deliver just that. I can imagine its tie-up with Writely, that could really be something.
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