In early summer I did a complete re-install of Windows on my "main" computer. I had started to get issues with external hard drives and recognition of USB devices in general. After a couple of years, the registry just holds on to too much information, much of it no longer relevant.
But, even though the re-install eventually went smooth, or relatively so, I have never been happy with the performance afterwards. Machine is has just been too slow, and certainly much more sluggish than before the "procedure" - and that was certainly not the objective!
I had sort of accepted it, but today I took some time to look in the Dell Support Forums and since I did not find anything relevant to my issue, I decided post a question. Low and behold, a "Peter" answered within a couple of minutes and asked what processor I had and if HyperThreading was on. Of course it was, it's always been on, but since I needed to double-verify the processor, I went into the BIOS to make sure that the info corresponded to what I had noted down fro mthe CPU casing (after I physically had it removed during cleaning). Sure enough, the info was correct and there was still a field that said "HyperThreading = Yes", followed by "These fields are for information only and can not be changed".
So, HyperThreading was there and on, but since it was a few month I dug through the BIOS, I decided to look through it again. For the upmteen time...
Low and behold: Under "Performance" there was a manual setting for "HyperThreading" and it was set to off. How could I have missed this one?
Turned it on, rebooted, Windows installed the additional software, rebooted again, and WHAT A DIFFERENCE! No longer is CPU tied up to 100% for menial tasks such as retrieving e-mail from a mail server, ripping a CD into mp3s, or simply scrolling through a long web page.
Who knew that little "feature" could make such a difference? I am happy again and not blaiming Dell for substandard hardware (even though they are using a weird combination of chipset SW sometime).
Lesson learned: When you checked everything umpteen times, check again...
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