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

Nice

[teebob21]

Now I know why my laptop burns my legs whenever I use it...it literally IS always on...so that's what my power management was set to. I had no idea that affected the CPU frequency stepping. I guess i just had assumed that was something that scaled intelligently depending on load average or some other *CPU* metric, not a battery setting.

Of course, being WinXP, I should have realized that Foo is actually changed each time I use the GUI to modify the behavior of Bar 1 and Bar 2, which are completely separate system functions.

Very easy to know when it's off

[istartedi]

For a while, I thought my fan might have been broken because my laptop was getting very hot. Then I realized that, a few months ago I had messed with the power setting and turned off that technology to make sure I was getting maximum performance out of something. I forgot to turn it back on, and this resulted in the machine running flat-out all the time and getting very hot. Something jogged my memory, I went back to the power settings, and it works fine now. Even DVD playback doesn't force it to run flat-out, so if you have this technology you should definitely use it.

Of course it's only easy to feel the heat with a notebook. If you have a desktop you could be wasting power and not even know it unless you check the settings.