Inspiron 1521 cpu throttle?

[Frozeninreality]

I'm running into a strange problem This inspiron 1521 was running slow as crap, so I looked into the bios and saw that the cpu clock speed was 96MHz! I thought disabling the AMD's power throttling thing (makes the cpu downstep if the battery is low) would help. It did till I shut if off again. Now its back to 96 mhz. Any thoughts?

 

[smittyzz]

I have the Inspiron 1520, i have had it for 3 days and i love it. i havent had this kind of problem and hope i dont.

 

[Frozeninreality]

I have the Inspiron 1520, i have had it for 3 days and i love it. i havent had this kind of problem and hope i dont.

Ill hope with ya, Dell sucks. This is my mothers laptop, Id never waste my own time with this crap.

To update, the name of the setting in bios is PowerNow! if that helps anyone

 

[Frozeninreality]

Double posting = not ok. I know this. Still, I really could use some help here, Ive been putzing with it for 3 days with no success. What would cause the cpu to randomly be set at 200 mhz? The list under cpu info in bios is:

Current CPU clock: 200mhz
Minimum CPU clock: 800mhz
Maximum CPU clock: 1.8 Ghz

If I toggle almost anything in bios (powernow! or the cpu nxe support options) it will go back to 1.8 Ghz. Sometimes it will make it into windows fine, other times it will slow down before It can. Sometimes I can restart, go back into bios and its at 1.8Ghz, sometimes it back to 200mhz, and occasionally even 96 Mhz. On occasion too, the bios post screen will take bloody forever just to let me get into setup. Im so horribly stumped At this point I just wanna know what it is lol. Someone...Anyone...help!

p.s Im running the onboard diagnostics right now. So far its passed everything. Could this be a case of a bad mobo/cpu?

 

[frozenlead]

96MHz is strange, I'll admit. Though a throttling notebook CPU is not.

Your notebook has three major factors that limit CPU speed -

1. Your current power setting (power saver/ high performance)
2. Your current CPU utilization (to save power, the CPU will only clock up when needed)
3. Your current CPU temperature (to protect the CPU from damage)

You should be able to achieve your full clockspeed by putting the notebook in high performance and running a program like prime95.

 

[Frozeninreality]

Well, the Powernow option is the one which lowers the clock speed in a low power state, thats in bios. I cant even get into windows when its at low clock. But being that this is occuring before I even load into windows could it even be windows related? Im a fairly able technician, but this is just odd.

 

[frozenlead]

Notebooks generally don't carry CPU throttling/major hardware performance features in their BIOSs. I've never heard of the options you're seeing in your BIOS before on a notebook..

Have you tried updating your BIOS?

 

[pcfixed]

did you try pressing f9 key in bios to restore default settings, then save changes and exit?

 

[Frozeninreality]

To Frozenlead, its there Powernow! option. I couldnt tell you why but no mistake its there. Also, yes Ive updated the bios to A06, the most recent available on the dell site, no improvements. To pcfixed, restoring default settings is pretty well pointless, because the bios is so simple there isnt much that could have been changed to cause this issue. It just started one day out of the blue a few months back. I got a call from my mom saying my sisters computer was acting up...and here I am now lol

 

[Eskatos]

I'm having the same exact problem. On top of that, the battery won't charge at all. I wonder if it is a complete power supply problem. Not sure what to do about that at all on a laptop though.