So I have this Dell Inspiron 1721 laptop. I searched all over and found drivers for XP for it... installed XP and got everything working. I noticed it was rather slow... so I checked it out Apparently the problem is the laptop itself is downlocking to 700 MHz... which is a big problem. I reset the BIOS and it changed it back to 1.6Ghz.... and then now its back to 700Mhz and resetting BIOS has no effect... any ideas on how to fix it thanks in advance
It's called EIST (or whatever the AMD variant is now called). When there is little load on the CPU it will drop it's multiplier and lower its clock speeds to reduce heat and save power. It's perfectly normal and wont lower performance, as the frequency will go straight back up when it encounters load. Chances are it's running slow because it's an old AMD X2 chip.
already checked in in CPUz... it never changes... like its supposed to, which is why I came here... and not sure how well Xlinks idea would work considering the BIOS even thinks its a 700MHz processor...