[salguod]

I have an older (about 5 years) Compaq laptop with a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor. I'm running XP home and have the max 1GB of ram installed.

My processor is a 1600 Mhz but when I right click 'My Computer', it reports that it's a 797 Mhz. I've checked many places (System properties, msinfo32, help and support, the Windows Management Instrumentation Tester utility, and CPU-Z), and in all it reports 797 except in the bios where it shows the true 1600.

I've looked through the power management options as well and didn't see anything about clocking the processor down. It's always running on outlet power anyway as the battery is kaput.

How can I figure out why it's only running at half speed and get my full processor back?

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This is AMD Cool & Quiet in action. This is normal behaviour.
If you put some load on the processor and do something intensive the CPU speed should increase.

[Neil Jones]

This is AMD Cool & Quiet in action. This is normal behaviour.
If you put some load on the processor and do something intensive the CPU speed should increase.

[salguod]

How can I verify this? It seems that no matter what the processor load, I get a report of 797 Mhz. I'm streaming music now and copying a large number of files. Task manager is showing 50-100% usage and it still reports 797 Mhz.

Can this feature be turned off anywhere? Since I'm always running plugged in now, I don't need the power savings of a reduced processor speed.

[Neil Jones]

This feature is not unique to laptops but it is useful for them, therefore most AMD laptops don't have an option to disable Cool & Quiet.
In any case streaming music isn't intensive, nor is file copying. An intensive operation would be some sort of heavy game that eats up the CPU cycle times, not that I recommend any on a laptop of that age anyway.

With all due respect, you're worrying about nothing. Many laptops report processor speeds as 800Mhz or thereabouts when idle. I really wouldn't worry about it. If the system needed the extra 800Mhz, it would have supplied them.

[salguod]

I suppose it is likely nothing, however it is disconcerting. OK, maybe just annoying.

It seems that it used to report the full 1600 Mhz, but I dunno for sure.