The Truth About Using msconfig: Commands to Check Your Real CPU and RAM

🧠 The Technical Truth Behind the Myth

If you came from our video about the famous msconfig myth, here is the promised guide with the commands to audit your own machine — clean, safe and straight to the point.

Out of the box, Windows already starts using 100% of your processor’s cores and all the RAM physically installed on the motherboard. The “Advanced boot options” screen inside msconfig isn’t there to speed the PC up — it’s there for developers and technicians to limit the machine on purpose, usually to test how software behaves on weaker hardware without needing a weaker computer.

📜 Why the Myth Spread

The confusion comes from old tutorials from the Windows XP and Vista era that taught these options for diagnosing hardware problems — not for improving performance. Somewhere along the way someone flipped the logic, and the myth stuck. It’s been copied from forum to forum and video to video ever since.

The legitimate uses of those boxes have always been technical:

• Diagnosing instability: technicians limited the active cores to find out whether a freeze was caused by poorly implemented multi-threading in old software.
• Compatibility testing: developers artificially reduced available RAM to simulate how a program would behave on a modest PC, without another physical machine.
• Isolating a faulty memory module: in rare cases, reducing “usable” memory helped check whether a problem was in a specific area of RAM.

In other words: they were always diagnostic and testing tools, never “optimisation”. Using them day to day without knowing exactly why only takes power away from your own hardware.

🔍 Checking msconfig in Practice

Before even opening PowerShell, you can visually confirm everything is at the default:

1. Press Win + R, type msconfig and press Enter.
2. Go to the Boot tab.
3. Click Advanced options.
4. Confirm that “Number of processors” and “Maximum memory” are unticked.

🛠️ Opening PowerShell as Administrator

1. Click the Windows Start menu.
2. Type powershell in the search box.
3. Right-click Windows PowerShell and choose Run as administrator.

With PowerShell open in administrator mode, the commands below work by pasting them directly and pressing Enter. None of them changes anything on your system — they only read information.

💻 Checking the Real Number of CPU Cores

This command lists the exact name of your processor, the number of physical cores and the number of threads (logical processors) Windows already recognises natively at boot:

Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor | Select-Object Name, NumberOfCores, NumberOfLogicalProcessors

The result shows the full capacity of your chip. It proves the system doesn’t need you to tick any box in msconfig to see every core — it has seen them since installation. Compare it with the manufacturer’s spec page for your processor model: the numbers should match.

🧮 Installed vs. Usable Physical Memory

Copy the whole block below and paste it into PowerShell. It calculates and shows, in gigabytes, how much memory is installed on the motherboard and how much Windows is free to use:

$Installed = [math]::Round((Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystem).TotalPhysicalMemory / 1GB, 2)
$Usable = [math]::Round((Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem).TotalVisibleMemorySize / 1MB, 2)
Write-Host "Installed physical memory: $Installed GB" -ForegroundColor Cyan
Write-Host "Memory usable by Windows: $Usable GB" -ForegroundColor Green

If the usable memory is equal (or extremely close) to the installed memory, your PC is fine. Windows usually reserves only a tiny slice of megabytes for basic hardware.

⚠️ Not Every Difference Is msconfig’s Fault

An important correction many people forget: if the usable value comes out noticeably lower than the installed one, that doesn’t always mean a wrong setting. There are legitimate, common causes:

To confirm whether your Windows is 32 or 64-bit (and rule that cause out), run:

(Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem).OSArchitecture

In short: with integrated graphics or 32-bit Windows, a 1–2 GB difference between installed and usable is completely normal. Only suspect msconfig if the gap is much larger, or if the boxes really are ticked.

🎁 Bonus Commands for a Full Audit

While PowerShell is open, check two more points that raise similar doubts:

Real speed of the memory modules — confirms whether the RAM runs at the speed advertised, or whether XMP/EXPO wasn’t enabled in the firmware (a common reason for RAM running slower than it should):

Get-CimInstance Win32_PhysicalMemory | Select-Object Manufacturer, Capacity, Speed

Whether any CPU core is disabled in the firmware — useful when someone changed a BIOS setting and limited cores by accident:

Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor | Select-Object NumberOfCores, NumberOfEnabledCore

If NumberOfEnabledCore is lower than NumberOfCores, a core was disabled manually in the BIOS/UEFI — review the settings there, not in msconfig.

🕵️ Other IT Myths That Still Fool People

• “Registry cleaners make the PC faster”: the real gain is practically zero on modern systems, and an aggressive cleaner can delete something important.
• “Defragmenting an SSD improves speed”: the opposite — it wastes write cycles with no speed gain, since an SSD reads any cell at the same speed. See the Victoria HDD/SSD guide to understand drive wear.
• “Closing processes in Task Manager frees RAM for good”: Windows already manages memory intelligently, using “free” RAM as cache for recent files — that’s optimisation, not waste.
• “Formatting fixes any slowness”: it fixes software clutter, but not hardware — a worn disk stays slow after any format. See the hidden warning from your HDD or SSD.

The pattern behind all these myths: someone confused a diagnostic tool with an optimisation one. The best “optimisation” is almost always a correct diagnosis — for example, the 4 commands that show the PC’s real health — and, for day-to-day junk, a simple cleanup script.

🔧 Common Errors and How to Fix Them

FAQ