I recently had a glitch that took out one of my two 1-gig memory sticks, an IDE to SATA converter card, and the boot sector of my main drive. I have replaced all of that, reloaded all the software, and everything is fine. Except, the cpu gadget I use shows core 2 on the core 2 duo as never going active--it reads 0% all the time. And core 1 goes up to 100% when I do anything very intense. Before the surge (or whatever it was) both cores tended to read around 50-60% or less, even when doing something intense. Is this more likely to be a cpu problem or a mb problem? Is there any way to test the cpu to see if it is bad? I hate to buy a new one and then find out that the mb was bad and not the cpu. Has anyone else ever had this problem?

TIA,
Stan

Yes Stan,
that Glitch could have damaged the motherboard... or CPU

Yes, I think I'm going to gamble on it being the cpu and try a new one. Dunno about return policies on cpus, but I would guess most places won't take them back.So, if it's not the cpu, I may be out the price for both a cpu and a new motherboard.