Processor speed decrease?

[armuk]

I recently restarted using my old Compaq Presario 905 laptop, with a Mobile AMD Athlon XP 1500+ that's supposed to have a processor speed of 1.33 GHz.

It was running very slowly and when I ran a diagnostic test (DXDiag) it showed that the processor speed was only 530MHz.

Can anyone help me as to why this is, and whether I could increase it again - and if increasing it would make my computer faster?


Thanks in advance!

 

[o1die]

The cpu may be throttling to save energy and increase your time between charges. Don't know if you can disable this in the bios. You can check at the post screen with the "del" key or one of the "f" keys.

 

[armuk]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I think it may be due to throttling by AMD PowerNow! (its a laptop) after all.

But is it worth disabling this? I did a bit of research and it says that PowerNow only throttles when processor is idle (I guess the speed reading in the diagnostic was low because the processor was idling when i ran the test), so would i really get any benefit by disabling or is it better to keep it enabled?

Thanks!

 

[armuk]

Ok thanks.

Is there actually any benefit in disabling PowerNow though? Because surely the speed would just increase whenever there is load on the processor instead of just staying that way all the time?

 

[armuk]

@ greghome & ps3hacker12

Thanks very much for the replies guys, I think I will keep it enabled then. And now I know there's nothing wrong with my processor either.


Cheers for all the help/info!