Despite the fact that in the store the buyer can see the characteristics of the purchased goods, in practice there are cases when unscrupulous sellers deceive gullible users. One such scam is specifying the wrong number of processor cores. Thus, you can greatly inflate the price and sell outdated goods at a higher cost. To avoid such deception, you need to understand how to find out how many cores are on a laptop.

Without software
Many modern laptops are sold without a pre-installed operating system. So programmatically checking the necessary information will not work. How to find out how many cores are on a laptop in this situation?
- First, these are mini stickers. Any official manufacturer of computer equipment glues the laptop with special stickers that confirm the licensed equipment (few people know, but without them, even a broken PC may not be taken to the service). Check out this sticker. For example, a sticker "Intel Inside CORE I5" would indicate the presence of a quad-coreprocessor.
- Specifications sticker. Another "external sign". Similar to the previous case, the manufacturer puts a sticker on the laptop, which will indicate the RAM, hard drive, video card and specific processor model.
- Another way to find out how many cores are on a laptop without turning it on is to ask the seller for technical documentation for a specific model. Everything will be listed there. Reputable stores won't turn you down.

Windows
The next method, how to find out how many cores are in a laptop processor, is hidden in the technical capabilities of the operating system. The fact is that it defines each core as a separate technical (physical) component. Therefore, you can use the following instruction.
- Open "Control Panel" through the "Start" menu.
- Then run "Device Manager".
- In the list that opens, find the item "Processors" and click on the arrow next to it.
- You will see a list of all available processors. Their number will match the number of processor cores.
At present, motherboards with sockets for several processors have begun to appear. In this case, carefully read the models of each processor. If two identical devices are installed in a similar computer, then simply divide the number of processors in the list in half. If they are different, then just count the number of processors of differenttype.
Third party software
There is also another way to get detailed information on the device of a personal computer or laptop. How to find out how many cores on a laptop using third-party programs?
You can use Everest Ultimate utility or CPU-Z. Just install them on your computer and run. They will collect all the information you need about the laptop and present it in an accessible and understandable way better than the "Device Manager" does.

In progress
Another way to find out how many cores are on a laptop also uses the built-in Windows tools. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and launch Task Manager. You can also do this by right-clicking on the bottom panel (with the "Start" button).
After that, go to the "Performance" tab. You will see a screen with a RAM load graph, and at the top of the window you can see several graphs with processor load. Each of them corresponds to a separate core. Actually, this will also answer the question: "How to find out how many cores a laptop has?" Even when idle, each chart should show at least one percent load.