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Processor Throttling In Windows XP
TomSlick writes "Michael Chu, a former Intel employee, has written up a fairly interesting and readable summary of Windows XP power schemes as they relate to Intel processor throttling. An old topic, but one still relevant as many business notebooks still use XP."
If you run XP, set the power scheme to "Minimal Power Management".
Unless, as a twitch-gamer, you (think you) can't afford to lose even a single CPU cycle, then by all means continue trying to heat your house in "Always On" mode (or the default of "Home/Office Desk", which means the same thing to AC-powered non-laptops).
As an interesting aside, TFA's author recommends "Portable/Laptop" mode; However, he writes that coming from the Intel world. Users of AMD chips (myself included) have noticed problems with CnQ (AMD's version of SpeedStep) not working correctly unless you set it to "Minimal Power Management", which according to the charts in the linked article, should work the same as "Portable/Laptop".
What is so wrong with Vista on modern hardware?
Well, instead of requiring a dual-core CPU and 2+GB to run tolerably, you could use that second core and second gig to actually run things you want, rather than nothing but OS-related eye-candy and DRM crapware.
Now, if you have a nostalgic desire for a machine that "feels" just like XP on a PII-300 with 256MB, by all means run Vista. If, however, you consider the OS "just a way to get to the real programs", you may want to consider upgrading from Vista to XP.
There is a program called cpufreq-selector that should come with the default installation. There is even a Gnome panel applet that interacts with it called CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor.
Sure you can:
cpudyn - CPU dynamic frequency control for processors with scaling
cpufreqd - fully configurable daemon for dynamic frequency and voltage scaling
cpufrequtils - utilities to deal with the cpufreq Linux kernel feature
All are found in your apt repository.
Enough RAM (I wouldn't recommend running Vista in less than 2GB) and a fast harddisk are all you need.
And if possible, use standby instead of a full shutdown and reboot: it keeps the disk cache intact, saving you from the sluggishness you otherwise experience in the first five minutes after boot. But don't try to combine standby with readyboost: they don't mix well, at least on my machine (frequently causes file system corruption on the USB stick, and sometimes inexplicable service crashes shortly after powering on).
That, and knowing that operations on large numbers of files/folders in Vista's File Explorer can sometimes be just as slow as a stalagmite trying to reach up to a stalactite. Workaround: use the command prompt instead of explorer if you want to delete or move a subtree with 10,000 files in it. It will save you hours, if not days.
Too bad you can't get rid of the bugs by adding more RAM. I mean bugs like that race condition that renames the wrong item if you start typing too fast after creating a new subdirectory in a directory that already contains a lot of items, and that logic error that can cost you some files if you don't carefully check if the correct files are selected by a 'shift-click' in list view (it tends to select more items than you wanted, if you shift-select when another application created new files or folders in the same directory after you selected the first one).
[BTW: one of these two bugs only happens with NTFS disks, I'm not fully sure anymore which of the two, but I believe it was the shift-select one.]
But for the rest, Vista seems to be just fine. Except for that new expensive DRM that is, and for media player making your network connection work slower, and for not being able to turn off that stupid "did you really start this" on a per-program basis, and maybe a few other minor issues I overlooked.
O yeah, probably due to a bad driver, but my sound acts weard too. Sometimes there's no sound in applications, but the "ping" still sounds when I change the volume through the speaker icon - takes a reboot to fix (or maybe not, if I only knew what driver or service to restart). Sometimes my sound volume is much lower after a standby/resume cycle, with the setting unchanged - also takes a reboot to fix. And it redetects my sound card as new hardware on every cold boot (i.e. not booting out of standby, but out of a full shutdown and power off). I wonder how long it's going to take before all those "hardware changes" are going to force reactivation.
I installed Vista at home, to get the feeling of it. Took me less than a week to decide that it's *not* ready for use at work yet.
"CPU(s) begin in lowest performance state and then get slower and slower"
This is remarkably sloppy writing for a supposedly technical article. Is there a performance state even lower than the lowest? Is he talking about clock modulation? Does it get "slower and slower" but never faster and faster?
Maybe I'll give it another shot when the service pack comes out.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.