I upgraded from an E8400 to a Q9650. They should be identical except that the
new processor has 4 cores vs. 2. They are identical cores and are clocked at
the same 3GHz. The new CPU even has twice the cache memory. After upgrading
the CPU, my spreadsheet was running half as fast. I use Crystal Ball as an
add-in. The first thing I noticed when troubleshooting was that the
computer/windows was not correctly recognizing the new processor. It saw it
as a quad core Pentium III Xeon. I upgraded the bios, motherboard system
software and the chipset software. When I go to hardware I now see a Q9650
but Excel 2007 is still running at half the speed it was with the old
processor. Out of curiosity I used msconfig to tell windows to use only two
cores at startup and re-booted. When I ran the spreadsheet with Crystal
Ball, the speed was back to about where it was with the dual core CPU but
maybe slightly slower. What do I need to do in order for windows or excel to
not slow down when four cores are used?