My wife's new Dell D531 laptop is acting really slow most of the time, so I installed SpeedSwitch XP. I found out the following:
- When you boot on battery, the CPU will run at 800MHz and will stay there no matter what programs you run.
- When you boot on AC, the CPU will run at 2GHz most of the time. half of the time it will still run at 800MHz, but a restart will then bring it to 2GHZ. Again, when it runs on 800MHZ, it will stay on that speed until you reboot, when it runs on 2GHz it will stay on that speed, even with Speedstep enabled in the BIOS.

Do you have it under warranty through Dell anymore?

You probably have a dell program that adapts the CPU speed depending of the load to spare battery life.

Look at your laptop documentation, it should be explained.
My eeePc have a similar mechanism.
By decreasing the CPU speed, the processor consume less battery.
Those programs usually monitor the CPU load, and when the load rise up, speed the cpu up too, but with a delay that will let you an impression of sluggishness

Originally Posted by tripy

You probably have a dell program that adapts the CPU speed depending of the load to spare battery life.

Look at your laptop documentation, it should be explained.
My eeePc have a similar mechanism.
By decreasing the CPU speed, the processor consume less battery.
Those programs usually monitor the CPU load, and when the load rise up, speed the cpu up too, but with a delay that will let you an impression of sluggishness

This thing happened to me as well. I guess tripy is right here! Check your laptop documentation, or get a tech support check it out on you.

maybe virus attack

Yes.. simply check your product documentation. Its a power management.

I feel this may not be a virus problem. Problem could be related to power management program. better to consult dell.

"What could be going on here?"
Sounds like it's working as it should. Laptops are designed to vary the CPU speed based on load....this keeps the CPU temp down & the battery life up. If your CPU ran at 2.0GHz at all times, you'd be charging the battery every hour. However, when it's plugged into a power source, battery life isn't an issue so the CPU will run at full speed. Assuming you have an Intel CPU, the technology used is called SpeedStep. If you have an AMD CPU, it's called Cool 'n' Quiet.

contact the authoirsed service center and udpate the BIOS or check the BIOS update in the google for the particaular model.. or once check the BIOS CMOS battery 3 volts lithium cell is installed on the mother board remove it and check it once..if its exhaust replace the new cell and make the BIOS to the default setting and then boot it..

I think you should see the Dell manual or call some agent .

You probably have alot of spyware installed, re-install, or get a better spyware program

Originally Posted by Brian07002

You probably have alot of spyware installed, re-install, or get a better spyware program

I was going to say the same. Sometimes on the PC we have ton's of the software installed and we never use those ones. Reinstalation time by tile should help

Contact Dell, they are indeed very helpful, I am impressed with their service.

well proper management of you laptop and checking its tech support of dell would help. Don't abuse it thought installing programs not needed

This is probably a feature of the laptop to minimize the consumption of the battery or to lower the power consumption. Try to run CPU intensive programs to see if it will go up or try other CPU monitoring application like CPUZ.

Originally Posted by Dalton

wow ...!! nice info about that .. maybe i should give it a try .. does it matters still if the PC is not DELL? have you tried it to other brands?

No, Power Management is a reference to Windows operating systems....well, Power Scheme to be more precise. Depending on what version of Windows you are running, you should be able to find Power Schemes located in the Control Panel. If you are not running a laptop and usually keep your PC on all the time, I would suggest "Always On" as it does not affect the performance of the computer.

You'll probably have viruses on your laptop.. try to repair it without reformatting! It means reformat only one drive of your laptop where you put your OS..

Maybe it is cause by viruses! Do you have anti-virus? Did you regularly update it? Update it regularly so that it can detect new kinds of viruses..

Go into the BIOS and disable Intel Speedstep if its an Intel processor. The power management may be dropping the multiplier on the chip. The FSB will stay the same but the multi would drop from maybe 9x to 6x depending on what chip is actually in there.

An example: On my Q9650 at 4.0Ghz under load the multi is 9x (FSB 1800), but when the computer is idling the multi drops to 6x and the clock speed then drops to 2.7Ghz.

to save energy it under clocks the cpu

login to your pc , find power options , and click high performance