D-oh! -Vista power settings

[luckyedboy66]

a couple months back i fanticly posted about how i thought i had permanently underclocked my lappy to .8ghz (normally 2.0ghz, dual core) via some oc/uc software i was fiddling with. it turns out that i had set my lappy to power saver in the vista power management options. however, it doesnt tell you that it underclocks the cpu, and there really is no way to tell, other than the overall sluggishness or some monitoring software. in fact, the monitoring software i was using (PCWizard2007) is the only way i found out that it was underclocked. thinking that i had done it inadverantly, i scrambled franticly (to no avail) to find a way to bring it back to full power. some time after i had given up, i stumbled upon the power options again, and noticed that it was set to 'power saver'. i then switched it to 'maximum performance', and voila, it was back to 2.0ghz. talk about d-oh! (has this ever happened to anyone else?)

i was reminded of that story because i was playing battlefield 2 the other day, and it was exteremely sluggish/laggy. frustrated, i shut it down and went to bed. then today, it hit me... "power saver, doh!!"

the moral of the story: if your lappy is laggy, make sure its not set to "power saver".

 

[AdmnPower]

actually some processors are designed to lower the clock speed when the processor load is low in order to conserve power and it will typically jump back up immediately when it is needed so you shouldn't notice any difference. For example i have a tablet pc running linux, it has a pentium M 1.7 ghz processor in it. When it is sitting idle the processor is running at 800mhz but when ever i do something when it needs additional power it will jump back up to 1.7 ghz. I don't notice any performance lag. This probably doesn't work as well with vista as it is such a demanding operating system.