Your OS won't *see* eight processors if you turn of HT. :-)
I'm going to pursue this digression just a little further, because
it probably will be biting you sooner or later. We make sure to
configure the BIOS on our database servers to turn off
hyperthreading. It really can make a big difference in performance.
OK, OK, I need to admit that this is a Core i7 720QM on an HP Envy 14 laptop. :-) There is no BIOS option to disable HT.
I am a doctoral student (but married with kids, about 5-10 years over traditional doctorate student age) and am trying to speed up some of my data analysis with parallelism. Right now the current operation,if run in series, takes 30 hours and only stresses one of the 8 (fake) cores. I'd rather see something that maximizes CPU use, provided that it doesn't overwhelm I/O.
Aren