So I picked up this older Dell D830. It's an old one because, even though it's a nice dual core machine, the cpu is only rated at 1.8 GHz. Still, it was really cheap and I can certainly use it.

I installed an OS, and watched while Microsoft stuffed it full of updates. While it was installing I ran CPU-Z to watch what was going on. Because of Speedstep, and because it was running on battery, the cpu speed would ping-pong between 800 MHz and 1.8 GHz. Fine - just as expected.

However, from time to time, the cpu speed would bounce up to 2 GHz. Hmmm.

Doesn't Microsoft/Dell know what the rated speed of the cpu is? Is this usual, or is there a bug in CPU-Z? Anybody else run into this? This is the only machine I've seen this happening on.