%CPU and Process Priority in Vista Options

[Guineu]

I'm sharing the work of a number cruncher among several PCs, 2 running XP, 1 running Win2000, and 1 Vista. The program is a small footprint compute-bound C++ program compiled and linked with Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 under XP. When this program is running under XP or Win-2000 with no competition, the Task Manager indicates CPU usage in the range 82-92%. The remainder is among the Idle process and background services, as expected. Changing the priority from Normal to Below Normal or Low produces the expected results when there are competing processes. Thus, no problems with XP or 2000. However, the Vista(32Bit) machine, a Dell Inspiron 1501 Laptop, AMD 64, Athlon X2, Dual Core Processor TK-53, 1.7ghz with 2.0GB Ram, is confusing me. My C++ program, on this machine, no matter what priority I give it, will not use more than 40% of the CPU. I must admit that my understanding of modern PC processors is limited to what I can infer from their names. Could it be that "Dual Core" is telling me that only 1/2 of my available computing power is allocated to this process, and that I would have to get involved in sophisticated Thread programming to get both "Cores" working on my program? OR, and I hope this is the case, is there a simple OS setting in Vista that currently has a single process capped at 40%?

Thanks for any tips,
--Guineu

[Guineu]

Could someone please suggest a better thread to move this question to? It appears this (Vista and Windows 7) forum does not interest the people who may have a comment on my question above.
Thanks, Guineu

This post has been edited by Guineu: Sep 8 2009, 04:47 AM