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."

Comments

Quick summary for the RTFA impaired...

[pla]

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".

Re:Many?

[pla]

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.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nice

[EvilIdler]

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.

Poorly written article

[Wesley Felter]

"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?

Re:Poorly written article

[confused one]

No, he's talking about Windows setting the processor to the lowest speed and then intentionally limiting CPU usage to less than 100%. That way it should use less power.

Re:Many?

[oakgrove]

I couldn't agree more with what you have typed. I gave Vista a very fair shot. I ran it for a week on a core duo laptop with 2 gigs of ram and a 7600Go video card. Not shabby hardware by any means. And it quite honestly could only be described as a complete dog. Not only slow but buggy as hell. I'd close the lid and when I opened it, the screen would flicker and when I finally got my desktop back after a few seconds, the icons would be out of place like I changed the resolution and changed it back or something. I mean, wtf? I get the whole thing about immature video drivers and all that but, really, this wasn't marketed as beta software. The CPU cores would both idle and I mean idle, on about 35 percent usage. Huh? In XP is was about 2-3 percent. And that matters because I take my laptop everywhere I go and use the battery. The taskbar would flicker inexplicably. I could go on and on. I dumped that sucker and moved back to something that actually works and stays out of my way.

Maybe I'll give it another shot when the service pack comes out.