Processor Speed far too puny...

[Doan]

Hi everyone,

I'm rather new to finding out how a computer actually works, but this is my problem:

I have a laptop, aspire 1350, 512 RAM and AMD Athlon 2600+, but it's clock speed is always around 400-800Mhz when I check the specs in CPU properties. I'm not sure if it's even supposed to be any higher than that, but 2600+ leads me to think it should be. I've been cruising sites for a while looking for helpful answers, but can't get any further than looking at the bios... Something that doesn't help me at all, since I have no experience with such things whatsoever. And I'm rather skittish about meddling with such things, since it's apparently rather close to permanently screwing up the cpu...

Can anyone give me clues as to what I should do to get it above at least 1.5Mhz? According to additional info on the net it should be able to reach that at least (I believe it should be able to reach a clock speed of around 2.1Mhz).

Sorry if I'm a noob, but you have to start somewhere... Right?

I'll be checking this post regularly, so ANY help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance, Dan (The Netherlands)

[Deerpark]

There is nothing wrong with your computer. Most newer laptops uses CPUs that regulates their clock speed according to the current workload. So when your computer is idle the CPU will throttle down to conserve power and when you need to do something CPU intensive it throttles back up. So this is completely normal and not something you need to worry about. If you want to see this throttling in action download AMD Clock from here. It should show you CPU's clock speed go up and down according to its workload.

By the way, you can disable CPU throttling although I don't really see any reason to do that. But still, I think you should have the option so here's an article explaining the different power schemes in Windows XP.
(You didn't say what version of Windows you have so I assumed XP.)
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/windowsxp/start-04.html

[Doan]

That clears up a whole lot for me! Thanks bunches, both for the info and the quick reply.