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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."

15 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Nice by teebob21 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. 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.

  2. Re:Many? by Dolda2000 · · Score: 4, Funny

    [...]no one, not even the "non-technical people" don't like Vista and its showing. Yeah, personally I dislike the Vista's showing even more than Vista itself.
  3. Very easy to know when it's off by istartedi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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"?
  4. 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".

    1. Re:Quick summary for the RTFA impaired... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      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 a renter, my electric bill is paid for by my landlord. My oil heating bill is not. Always On mode greatly reduces my spending in the winters.

    2. Re:Quick summary for the RTFA impaired... by LLuthor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So buy an electric radiator or two. They are cheap. No need to reduce the lifespan of your CPU and/or mobo just for heat.

      --
      LL
  5. Re:Doncha hate "Misread" headlines? by rock_climbing_guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is Professor Throttling of any relation to General Failure or Colonel Panic?

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  6. Re:Many? by yvajj · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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.

  7. Re:Many? by DAldredge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  8. I use Outlook by bl8n8r · · Score: 4, Funny

    as a cpu throttler.

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  9. Re:Many? by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    instead of requiring a dual-core CPU and 2+GB to run tolerably That is absolute bullshit. I can't speak for RAM, since I have 2 GB for gaming purposes, but I was running Vista on a single-core Athlon 3200 with NO problems whatsoever. Everything performed like a charm. A dual-core CPU isn't anything close to required.
    --
    "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
  10. Re:Many? by suv4x4 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  11. XP vs. Vista by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 5, Funny

    XP can throttle your CPU, but Vista downright chokes it.

    --
    You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  12. 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.

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