Windows XP and the L2 cache fix issue/confusion

Hi,

I've had several Dell computers over the years and in fact I've just bought another one, a Dimension 8300 3.0Ghz (HT).

The setup screen reports that this processor has 1024 of L2 cache.  I haven't seen much written about this on the Dell forums so I thought I'd ask.

Windows (all NT,2K, XP versions) is set up to recognise only 256k of L2 cache by default.  So if your processor has more than that (as a lot of the newer ones do) you are presumably not taking advantage of the processors increased L2 cache.

I was the sysadmin for a company and we had a quad processor (Xeon PII) Dell 6300 that had 1024 L2 cache on each processor and I remember how slowly it ran until I adjusted the L2 cache size in the Windows registry to match what the processors actually had.

The question is this: I just got my new machine and haven't adjusted the Windows L2 cache setting (it was setup only last week and has only what the factory installed on it).  Is there still a need to go in and adjust the L2 cache size in the registry to match the L2 cache size of the processor or is this automatically handled by the operating system in some other way?

Secondly, if I do need to adjust the L2 cache size in the registry, why isn't this done by the factory when they image the machine?  Is this some undocumented tweak that Dell doesn't know about, or doesn't support, or is actually bogus/bad information?

Thirdly, (if this is a valid tweak) since the processor is a hyper-threaded 3.0 Ghz, do I set it to 512kb (half for each of the "processors" in the chip) or set it to 1024kb?

Here's a link to the site that I'm referencing: http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/116/ 

Thanks,

Mike