Will I see an increase in performance if I use Windows 7 Professional over Home Premium? Regarding multiple physical cores

Question

I have 2 physical cores and Home Premium specs say it only recognizes one but Pro recognizes multiple. If I swap out my Home Premium with Pro will I see an increase in performance? I have an Intel i5 m430; it has 2 physical cores and 2 logical processors per core.

I run a dualboot configuration with Ubuntu 12.01 and never really understood why Ubuntu felt faster/snappier in some regards compared to Windows. Ubuntu recognizes multiple cores, and this got me wondering if this is why and if I could see a performance increase if I swap out to Pro.

Answer 1

Short answer no.

Long answer: You're confusing cores with sockets. Windows home only recognises 1 SOCKET (that's the physical CPU), that CPU might have 1,2,4,6 physical cores (and maybe even more).

But if you install windows home in a computer that has 2 CPUs (such as the Asus Z9PE-D8), windows home will only use one.