Windows 7 CPU Parking

I can pretty much guarantee you every single one of those things has happened. They most certainly are not Urban Legends. At least 4 of the 5 listed are things that I had to deal with personally during my 5 years as a technical support representative.

If you want the system to show you the filetype extensions, open up a Windows Explorer window and ALT+T then hit O for Folder Options.

Go to the View tab of the window that pops up. In the list you're shown, UNcheck "Hide extensions for known file types".

Also from this screen, if you have a file/folder layout that you LIKE (like detail view and you want EVERYTHING to be detail view by default, you can set it here too.


%windir%\system32\restore\Filelist.xml


Just like XP, you can right-click on Computer (My Computer in XP) on either the desktop or the Start Menu and select Manage from the menu that pops up. The disk manager is in there.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Yeah, I know how to do it. I eventually found out how to force the thing to show me the original menus, but MAN... Why hide them so deep such that you can't even reason out where they are? I mean, I know a thing or two about how Windows works, but when every new version basically jumbles the menu so I don't know where everything went and when it makes no logical sense where to look for it...

For instance, to show my menu bar in Explorer, I have to go to Organise -> Layout -> Menu Bar. Knowing where it is, I can kind of see that it makes some sort of sense, but NOT knowing where it is, why would I even look for that in Organise? It has Copy and Cut there, why would the main menu be hidden behind THAT? Worse still, Internet Explorer hides its main menu, but THAT is hidden behind a cog-icon button that represents Settings, so I was looking for a settings options somewhere, which doesn't actually exist outside of the main menu, which I was trying to show.

Beyond that, the Folder Options menu is the same as it was in XP, which is the same as it was in 95. It's just hidden in different places every time, I guess to make the hunt more interesting every time I upgrade.


The who of the what now? What does that even mean?

That I did not know. I'm used to looking at Properties for My Computer, from where I usually get to my Windows Update and Device Manager. When you mention it now, I actually remember I found that option on XP at one point (I actually followed a motherboard manual to find it), but it seems like I forgot where it was since then. I don't think I'll forget again, though, since it's actually easy to remember.

And, by the way, the "Search programs and files" option in 7 is a godsend. As long as I have a reasonable idea as to what the thing I'm looking for is actually called, I can find almost anything. That still leaves a few things open to question, such as how to find the settings for a network connection I may have disabled (say, the Local Area Network Connection on a Laptop that uses only Wireless), but I'm sure there has to be a list of them somewhere. In fact, searching for "network connections" reveals a "View Network Connections" link that, judging by the icon, ought to be available from the Control Panel. I did set it to Small Icons, by the way, and it has been a GODSEND, because that doesn't seem like it's hiding any options for my "convenience."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Two things I've personally seen:

1. I've never seen anyone ask about the "any key." But I *have* seen people ask where the "space bar" is (think about it).

2. I know someone who had to actually fix the problem where somehow a screencap of a program end up being their desktop background, and they can't figure out why the program isn't working.

Also, I've never met someone who thought the CD drive was a cup holder, but I did meet someone once who had three CD drives installed in their machine, because, and I'm not making this up, he owned three programs that came on disc. Each program CD was permanently mounted on its own drive.

On the subject of CPU parking. The purpose to parking isn't really to save power. Its actually a method whereby Windows 7 can detect which of the 8 pseudocores the i7 presents to the OS are really physical cores, and which are hyperthreaded cores. Windows 7 then "parks" the hyperthread cores which tells the Windows 7 scheduler not to use them unless the first four physical cores get more or less maxed out.

This is almost *always* the right decision. Hyperthreading works differently for P4s and the newer Core-iXs, but there are certain gross similarities. In particular, ultimately there aren't two complete cores there: there is one core in which not all of the resources are being used simultaneously.

To a first order approximation, think of a hyperthreaded core as one full core, and a partial core made up of the left-over bits of the full core. Obviously, as the full core runs the left-over bits change dynamically over time, so the left-over core gets more and less powerful over time.

You could sort of think of the two cores as one core running at 2.8 Ghz (say) and the other running at a variable clock rate that wildly swings around between maybe 0.5 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz.

So your i7 has four 2.8 Ghz cores, and four cores with wildly variable and slower clocks. Which do you use first? Is it *ever* a good idea to use one of the left-over cores if any of the full cores are sitting idle? Generally not.

And it gets worse. Using a left-over core can, sometimes, temporarily slow down the full core. If the left-over core grabs a resource and doesn't give it back fast enough, the full core can actually slow down waiting for those resources to come back.

(That's not how it really works, but its a useful mental model: on Nehalems to the best of my knowledge hyperthreads are time-slice multiplexed mapped onto the shared core resources, which means the threads share resources: there might be a priority execution thread but its not quite so binary).

So if you have four full cores running at, say, 50% utilization each, and four hyperthreaded cores unused, it is probably still better to schedule a new thread that needs 10% of a core onto one of the "full" cores, even though they are 50% loaded and the hyperthread cores are completely empty.

Vista is *not* hyperthread-aware, and will schedule all eight cores completely randomly, without regard to which pairs of pseudo cores are actually sharing a single physical core. So out of eight cores, Vista might use four, and accidentally use both both threads from a single core, using only two of the four physical cores and leaving the other two empty. Or it might try to spread the load out among all eight cores, causing four of the cores to actually slow down the other four cores in the process.

In this case, there's not too much brains necessary to pick the right thing to do, except in weird corner cases. The correct thing to do is usually to execute one execution thread per core until you start to run out of CPU, then switch to running two execution threads per core with hyperthreading. It almost never makes sense to take a relatively low utilization CPU and try to split up its load into hyperthreads.

(The practical difference between P4 hyperthreading and Core-iX hyperthreading as I understand it is that because the P4 was sharing a superpipeline, hyperthreading penalties could be high in many cases. That's less likely to happen in the Core-iX architecture, which is not superpipelined and is sharing wide resources, not deep ones.)

Thank you, Arcana, for the link and for the explanation. That proves I didn't know what I was talking about when it comes to processor parking, and it proves that asking before doing something stupid was a good idea. I guess it pays to know when you don't know

I'll fiddle with Windows God Mode. That should save me a LOT of crap and curse words in the long run. It's nice to have everything in one place so I don't have to remember which options is hidden behind each rock. I can't try it right now since my work PC is running XP, but I'll definitely give it a shot when I go home.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.