Double the Speed of your IBM Thinkpad in Less Than a Minute!

One of my developers noticed that his new IBM T43 Thinpad seemed to be running rather slowly.  Upon talking to IBM Support, he was informed of a great power-conservation feature of the Intel Centrino CPU - SpeedStep Technology - which runs the CPU at half speed when running on battery. It may also run at half speed even when you are on AC - depending on your power management settings!

The way to check this (when running on AC) is to right click on My Computer and select Properties.  At the end of the General Tab, you can see the speed of the CPU, as well as the speed at which it is actually running.  On my T41, it was in fact  running at half of its rated speed !

To correct this, you need to do a few things:

(1) Reboot your laptop and press F1 to enter the BIOS Setup Utlity.  Select Config | Power.  Scroll down until you find the entry for Intel SpeedStep Technology and make sure that both Mode for AC and Mode for Battery are set to Maximum Performance.

(2) On the Power Schemes tab of the Power Options Properties, you need to choose the Home/Office Desk Power Scheme.

After that, you should be a happy camper (like I was).

 

 

 

2 Comments

  • Jackie, I rushed to try it out, and here is what I found -



    I tried this on my T43, and then ran a VB6 benchmark which hold the CPU at 100% utilization. The improvement was from 36 seconds to 35...



    My computer did report it was working at half speed before the change, but my understanding is that the default 'Automatic' is an "On Demand" setting that will ramp up to full capacity when needed, which is what I saw in my tests, I think.



    Thanks anyway.

  • That is probably correct, but that does not change the fact that for the system to determine that it should boost it's CPU speed you need to generate some serious work. I expect my system to work at 100% capacity (when on AC) even if I just need to do a short burst of heavy work.

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