System MHz

Hi, why does my laptop sometimes say its only 519 mhz? It will change what it says without me unplugging or plugging anything in. And sometimes it goes really slow and I check the proceses and it just says system idle process is using most of the CPU time?

it's speed stepping probably, where the system changes the speed of the CPU when it feels like it will not affect performance, if your playing games it should run full speed, but if your playing around in wodows, it'll probably run slower. You can disable this in the bios.

grrr. That sound like and idea. Its slowing down when it totally shouldn't. Too frequently I'll have a few of just folders or websites open and it takes 5 seconds to close a window.

SpeedswitchXP

Free program that'll let you do anything you want with your speed stepping. I make mine run full speed on AC and allow it to step down on battery.

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

And whassup with that 448 meg of ram?! You got a 64 meg shared memory video card in that? :)

Speed stepping is kind of a necesary evil on laptops -- without it, your battery life would be completely down the toilet, and especially since most people rarely use their PC at full throttle anyway, stepping down the CPU speed is an acceptable trade-off to most.

Yup, but I don't for example use my laptop much without it being plugged to the wall. We bought a laptop to replace the second bulky PC box and now have the laptop in the kitchen/living room table... so it wasn't bought because we wanted mobile PC, we just wanted small one to be able to put it somewhere where we would use it easily.