Intel Core 2 Duo Reports as Pentium III in Windows XP

I have been running into a lot of people having issues with Windows XP recently who use WMI to poll data from machines running Intel Core 2 Duo processors.  These processors report as Pentium III processors through the WMI Win32_Processor class.

This is caused by an actual bug that appears to be impacting Windows XP Pro SP2 and Windows XP Pro SP3 machines only.  It most definitely does not affect the Windows Vista family.

Under some circumstances the Core 2 processor may report as a Pentium III or as a Pentium III XEON.

This behaviour has no known ill side effects other than causing confusion for people attempting to catalogue their machines via the WMI interface and finding that their machines believe themselves to be quite old even when they are obviously very new.

A hotfix is available from Microsoft for this issue: KB953955

References:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/XP-SP3-Win32-Processor-Class-Labels-Intel-Core-2-Duo-CPUs-Incorectly-90201.shtml

http://wccftech.com/forum/computer-talk/20133-xp-sp3-win32-processor-class-labels-intel-core-2-duo-cpus-incorrectly.html

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