Am quite satisfied with my new workhouse which has 2.0 Ghz dual core, 667 Mhz FSB processor, 1 GB 667MHz RAM, 7200 rpm HDD and discrete nVidia graphics card.... good enuff to be a business workhorse and satisfy my needs of running different servers from time to time to play around with the latest technology. Plus its too silent. No Noise. Curious, I went about to benchmark my state of the art (at least on 32 bit platform) workhorse . Installed my trusted SiSoft sandra to benchmark my notebook and to look into each config in detail. With high expectations and pride , I started the CPU benchmarking suite and waited patiently for the results.

I was disappointed . The results were way below the expectation, even when comparing the benchmarks with the preset benchmarks for even single core 1.5 G CPU , the latter scored.

Curious, started my research (aka googling) and as advised by my research results , started the tests again with the power monument as Always ON. The idea being to reduce the CPU throttling used by Windows Power management and to extract the full performance.(Anyway my adapter being faulty and still waiting the replacement from Dell, my battery wont charge and hence can run only on AC power)/

Continuing my search , stumbled upon this article from MS

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=896256

Apparently there is a bug in Microsoft XP, even in SP2. The OS was not designed for multi core or multi processor systems and hence cant extract the full performance. I was keen to see if MS can help me out of this glitch. Help was available, but not readily. Apparently this is a HOTFIX , which i guess means that you call up MS or contact them and then convince them to give the fix to you....Phew!!!!

Searching further found that this problem is much generic and quite widespread. Users have reported drasitc imprvement in performance after applying the fix and following the instruction in the MS article. The results from various sites were tempting me to try this out.

Some more googling and I could find that some nice soul had uploaded the hotfix on one of the servers . Now I am the bit adventrous type. I take the precautions, like scanning my downloads for malicious programs and the stuff an keeping backup of my docs in the external poertable USB HDD, because I like to try out the new things. So I went ahead and based on number of user inputs downloaded the hotfix and installed it along with the reg hack suggested by MS.

My results after that : I havent seen any noticeable improvement in my benchmarks , but there seems to be improved performance on MS Need for Speed Underground 2 Trial version. I am not sure, cause I havent been timing it much earlier or playing it too often.

So wat next!!! My search continues and am also looking for some notebok specific benchmarking tools.

A note though: Whatever be my performance benchmark results, I am happy so far with the performance. But if the statistics are true and I am able to extract more performance, I would be happier. All comments/suggestions are welcome.

Waiting eagerly for my dell notebook AC adapter.