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Processor Throttling In Windows XP

Posted by kdawson on from the why-are-they-doing-that dept.

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."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Quick summary for the RTFA impaired... by pla · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  2. Re:Nice by EvilIdler · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Many? by oakgrove · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
  4. Re:Poorly written article by confused+one · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.