Why 4 CPUs appear in Task Manager while processor only has 2?

[WellEatenPanda]

About a year ago, my dad bought a new laptop with Intel i3-370M processor and integrated graphics. I found that in the Task Manager, under Performace->CPU Usage History graph is split into 4 windows, even though the processor only has 2 cores. Also when setting the affinity of a process, 4 cores appear. Why are 4 windows shown, while only 2 physical cores are in the processor?

P.S. Does 4 threads in the hyper-threading CPU stated above mean that 4 threads can be run at the same time while many more of them could be pending, as Task Manager also shows about a thousand threads.

Thank you very much.
A noob wanting to learn.

 

[Alain123]

Coes the processor also has 2 threads.
Threads are bassicly just virtual cores so 2 real cores and 2 virtual cores.

 

[manofchalk]

Operating systems basically see a thread as a CPU core, from back in the days when CPU's were single core and only supported a single thread.
Your i3 has two cores, and through Hyperthreading supports an additional two threads. To the OS, it appears as if it has four CPU cores to use.

I believe the thousands of threads your seeing is Windows splitting up the"actual" threads to distribute to various programs. Though when it comes to the inner workings of an OS, I'm not too clued in so I could be wrong here.