Quote Originally Posted by DataMiser View Post
The timer has never been all that accurate. If the timing is important to your program then the issue may be more in the way it uses the timer rather than the timer itself.

Having to disable the cores on a multicore processor seems like a very bad thing to do.

Perhaps you should consider using a VM with XP loaded into it. Windows 7 pro allows you to download and use what they call XPMode which is a Windows VM preloaded with XP SP3

My issue with the multiple cores is that each one uses a different time reference. So as the OS bounces processes around from core to core the process is being told that it is a different time then it saw 5msec ago. Its a problem for critical functions that need to fire off at a specific time. At 4am a process starts, then is bounced to another core where it is not yet 4am (albeit a tiny bit less) so the process starts again and the two compete for resources. Or worse yet, immediately prior to the 4am start, the process is bounced to a core where the time is after 4am, thus the needed action at 4am never occurs. This is the only thing running on this stand alone machine, except for all the junk that windows does in the background.