Travel Technology - Brand new laptop sluggish - this is what I found

I was helping friends who have had a Dell Inspiron 1100 with a 2.4GHz Celeron and 512MB RAM - it did everything they wanted it to. After a while they decided they needed a second laptop in the house so ordered the nearest equivalent which was a Dell Inspiron 1150 - also with a 2.4GHz Celeron and 512MB RAM

Both machines have inbuilt DVD players.

They complained that the newer machine was always much slower and wouldn't play DVD movies. I ran through it first removing unnecessary processes and compared to the older machine it was still definitely slower. I decided to go to Control Panel to look at System to see if it did indeed have the correct CPU and memory configuration. To my surprise it showed that the machine had a 2.40GHz Celeron that was running at only 287MHz - which would certainly explain the reason it wouldn't play DVD movies while the older machine did.

I did some Google searching and discovered Intel SpeedStep (http://www.bay-wolf.com/speedstep.htm#1) technology which slows the processor speed on laptops to conserve battery life.

After some more poking around with Control Panel Power Profiles I discovered that on this particular machine, with the Power Profile set to Laptop, the CPU speed was 287MHz regardless of whether the machine was connected to the mains or running on battery. This is the setting the machine comes with when shipped from Dell.

This was not good. I changed it to minimal power management and everything worked fine until I logged off and restarted. When it started up and someone else logged on, exactly the same problem happened. It turns out that the power profile needs to be set in control panel for every single user of the machine (this machine has five!)

What a right royal pain in the backside! I wonder how many folks have a ridiculously slow machine and have no idea how to fix it.

It was shipped like that? Is that the profile when running under battery or also when plugged in?

There have been a bunch of updates for the intel speedstep stuff on the dell support website. Did you look to make sure they have the updates (+ drivers, etc) from the Dell website and also are up to date with Windows Update?

Also, doesn't Dell use their 'quickset' application for this? I always turn that off. there have been lots of updates for quickset also.

I usually use a bit of freeware called speedswitch xp .. it has different power profiles for when you're on battery and when you're plugged in plus things like "max battery", "max performance", etc and you can change the power profile manually just by right clicking the system tray applet.

-David

Set it to "always on" and it should run full speed. At least it works on my Dell Inspiron 8200 with a Speedstepped P4m.

I have never heard of such a stepdown (factor of 8!). My old Inspiron 750 had a SpeedStep PIII which ran at 750 plugged in or 600 on battery.

I've fixed the problem by setting it to minimal power management (not Always On). The machine is fully up to date with Windows Update and I checked all available updates for that particular model on the Dell site.

When the laptop came it certainly did run at 287MHz regardless of power source. The laptops are rarely far from a mains power supply so squeezing the last few extra minutes out of the battery isn't important.

Some laptops with power management will step down processor speed when it gets too warm. This prevents the CPU from frying. You may want to prop the feet up, and make clearance for the fan vents.

This is quite timely as I just got received my Micron X3000 with a celeron processor that seems quite slow for being so zippy. I will try this when I get home.

lala