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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."
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.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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".
Is Professor Throttling of any relation to General Failure or Colonel Panic?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
From you post, I gather that you have not run Vista. I am running it comfortably on my laptop (~1GB ram with AMD cpu) and my desktop (AMD X2 3800) with nary a problem.
The only stuff I turned off is the animated windows and window transparency (which I hate in general). Desktop composition and other "eye-candy" is still on (I actually find desktop composition to be useful, since I can mouse over stuff on my taskbar thats hidden by other windows and view whats going on in a realtime thumbnail window).
This is undoubtedly blasphemy on this Linux-centric site, but I actually like Vista, and find the little nuances a welcome change from XP.
My main windows box is a dual core Pentium @ 1.6 Mhz running on an Intel DG33TL motherboard, 2 GB Crucial ram, 300 GB SATA drive and Windows Ultimate. It isn't sluggish, in fact it runs rather quickly, nothing like a PII-300. Perhaps I am doing something wrong?
After using WinXP, it's not the processor that wants to throttle the system - it's me. So I installed Linux instead.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
as a cpu throttler.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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.
Are you some sort of Microsoft fanboy there?
Over here Vista requires 256 cores and 1 petabyte of RAM to run tolerably. And then I run Calculator.exe and it stalled. I'm checking every day how the Calculator launch is going and it's painfully slow. It's been over 9 months now and it's done rendering the buttons from 1 to 6, it still has 7 to 9 AND all operators to finish with.
I'm seriously pissed off, if it's not done by 2008 I'll be upgrading to XP.
I have now made TWO attempts to try Vista Premium on top of the line hardware (one desktop and one laptop). It is much slower than XP (I don't mean benchmarks, I mean the experience of actually trying to get work done). After I removed Vista and went back to OEM XP Pro, the performance boost was amazing. I do media production and there's no way I could have worked for any length of time with Vista and not thrown the computer through the window in frustration.
Plus, it's full of all sorts of DRM crap. That alone is a stopper for me. I will not willingly run an operating system that is designed to get in my way. And I seriously doubt if any Vista SP1 is going to get rid of the DRM. I'm afraid Windows XP is going to be my last Microsoft operating system unless they take a significantly different direction.
I'm trying to think of something positive about the experience of having used Vista for the approximately 20 hours that I had it on my machines (combined) before I formatted the hard disks and installed Windows XP. I honestly have nothing.
It's not like I hate Microsoft or anything. If they have a product that helps me get work done, I'll use it and pay for it. I don't consider them all that much more "evil" than any other huge American corporation, including Apple. But Vista is simply garbage, in my opinion. I have also suggested to all of my "strategic partners" in the work I do (bandmates, graphic artists, video producers, etc) that they stay well clear of Microsoft Vista. All but one took my advice. The one who decided he just had to have Vista lasted about a month before switching back to XP (because he's a gamer). Many of us have installed Ubuntu Studio on our secondary systems.
You are welcome on my lawn.
XP can throttle your CPU, but Vista downright chokes it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Maybe I'll give it another shot when the service pack comes out.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.
I saw a box sold with Home Basic which had something like an 80 gig drive, 512 megs of RAM, and a 1.7 ghz processor.
It was absolutely unusable.
The processor was not a bottleneck, I'll give you that much. And I didn't stay on it long enough to test if the network was the bottleneck -- that whole sound-drops-you-to-10% bug (a fucking BUG, not a feature) -- but I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't, for this simple reason:
The RAM killed it. Even if it weren't for the network bug, it'd still browse slower than dialup, because it was CONSTANTLY swapping out.
No, not "Often", or even "Most of the time". Not only when I, as a geek, was trying to coerce it to do more than it was designed to, like, say, download some updates, or install Firefox.
It was swapping ALL the fucking time. I popped in a 512 meg USB stick and used it for ReadyBoost, which improved things marginally -- it was then capable of doing some things in maybe 20-30 seconds, instead of 2-3 minutes. And by "some things", I mean opening another tab in a browser -- Firefox or IE7, didn't matter. (And like 5 minutes or so to switch between them...)
I may be getting the times wrong, but let me put it this way: I've used an NT4 machine with some 128 megs of RAM. I've used a Win98 machine with 32 megs of RAM -- also a Linux handheld with 32 megs of RAM, and that had to use a CompactFlash card for swap.
That 512 meg Vista machine was the absolute WORST computing experience I've ever had. Ever, in fifteen years. The only thing that comes close was a videogame on Win3.1, running off a 4x CD-ROM drive, but at least it was fast once it loaded the damned level.
So yes, I realize Vista can be fast. But considering that it sucks so badly, even compared to older versions of Windows, on 512 megs of RAM, you have to ask yourself, are you actually getting to use the rest of your RAM? Say you need to run a memory hog app like Eclipse -- Vista could be the difference between needing 2 gigs of RAM for Eclipse and nothing else, or needing 1 gig of RAM and being able to play music and still have a fast network.
Didn't even touch on disk usage, but there's really no excuse there. After installing Kubuntu, plus a bunch of codecs, plus a bunch of apps not in the main install, including a couple of versions of Wine and some Windows apps, it was maybe 5 or 6 gigs. The above Vista install was 15 gigs, before you go download drivers, VLC, install Office, etc. Consider that there was also a restore partition, not even a hidden one (it was mounted), which used maybe 20-30 gigs (and wasn't even entirely full), and it's an 80 gig hard drive, total. Which means you're giving about half your hard drive up to the fucking OS, before you even install software. Sure, it's inconsequential for your 300 gig drive, but it is a waste, don't you think?
The question is not whether there's hardware that can run Vista well. That's a given. The question is whether you'd be better off with XP, and more and more, the answer is a resounding yes!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!