Compaq nx7400 Intel T5600 running like a P3

[auriuman78m]

Not sure if I classed topic correctly. Strangest laptop issue I've ever seen. Would love some suggestions on this please. Here's my situation:
I'm working on this nx7400 because it was experiencing some speed/hanging issues in Windows XP. You could type and it would take 3-4 seconds to show up in IE, for example. Long story short, I ended up finding the system BIOS being corrupt. So I ordered this guy a new motherboard after seeing flashing wouldn't solve it. I've got the new motherboard installed, wiped the hd and installed XP again along with all drivers. It's still behaving the same way, as if it were a P3! I've swapped different memory into it and even a different Intel processor into it - it came native with a T5600, I swapped a T5500 into it. New system battery. The weirdest part is that CPU benchmarks are even producing results as if it were being run on a P3... I've replaced dang near everything that's replaceable. Right now the only thing left originally is the hard drive, lcd and cd-rom. I wouldn't think any of those components would produce failure symptoms like I'm seeing but is it possible? Stumped in Kansas City.

 

[joytech22]

I know this might sound funny but I own a Acer laptop from 2004 which came with a Intel Celeron @ 1.6GHz, It ran worse than my old system (VIA 800MHz) and both ran XP, I found out that the BIOS did not support the Celeron CPU and clocked it down to 400MHz to be safe.

I flashed the BIOS to it's most recent version and the CPU ran properly thereafter, that laptop still works today.

 

[auriuman78m]

Thanks for the idea, I did try the updated BIOS but no effect. It ended up being the strangest thing although it makes sense after I think about it. I had left it on all night running some bench tests. I had been using it on battery for a while before I left it plugged in. When I checked it out the next morning I noticed the battery was still in a charging status -- red flag! I shut it down, pulled the battery and restarted it. Guess what? No more performance issues! It never even occurred to me to check out the battery. It makes sense it would do that if it were, say, sucking over half the input power for a terminal downward spiral charge... how could the processor possibly operate at full capacity when the battery's eating up its power? Thanks everyone.