CPU won't run at full speed on i9300

Hey everyone,

I'm not sure whats going on, but my CPU will NOT run at full speed when its plugged in. Before it ALWAYS ran at 2.0GHz (Pentium M 760) but since yesterday its only been running at 800mhz. I'm dual booting my laptop with XP and Vista Beta 2 and Vista usually loaded fairly quickly. Well this morning I tried to get into it and it was slow as could be. In the BIOS it showed it was running at 2.0GHz, but when windows starts to load it only runs at 800mhz, whereas before it never did this. On top of that, my GPU fan does not work anymore. I contacted Dell about this last night and they're supposed to be sending a technician to my house, but I wanted to know what everyone else thought about the CPU issue. In the system properties, i9kfangui and cpu-z, they all show the cpu running at 800mhz. Wth is goin on with my system??

I checked the power management and that wasn't the problem. It did this whether I was in XP or Vista. Last night I formatted and just installed Vista Beta 2, it "crawled". A few days ago Vista was usable now it took over a minute even for a basic window to come up. I'm not sure whats going on but I can't take this. I still haven't heard from a technician yet so I don't know whats going on. I ran CPU-Z when I was in Vista and it showed the processor running at like 218mhz. The CPU fan turns on high by itself (it NEVER did this before) whether its in XP or Vista. So I think there's a hardware problem somewhere, I just don't know if its a bad processor board or what.

It shows that its running at 2000mhz in the bios, but in windows it runs like its on battery.

PEBKAC i'm unsure about the power adapter. But if i can remember to try this when I get home i will.

Big fat clown, i set the power management to desktop, always on, and tried a few other things. On top of that, it did the exact same thing on a clean install of Vista Beta 2 (when i first installed Vista everything worked fine). I restored the XP image i made before i partitioned my hard drive (known good image that worked fine) and it did the exact same thing, it's still running at 800mhz.

Dell called me yesterday when I was at work to see if i had heard from a technician and I have not heard from anyone yet (I have next business day service, this shows what that service is worth). The lady I spoke to said they have ordered several parts but she wouldn't tell me which parts were ordered.

So at this point i'm getting very frustrated because I would like to continue using Vista Beta 2 as I like the OS (I don't want to install it on my desktop, too many past issues with it and its finally running the way I want, so I don't want to screw with it until I upgrade it next year).

I guess I should just wait until I hear from a technician and see what they say about it. The only thing i've ever changed on the laptop is the memory and it was doing this before I did the memory swap (borrowed a 512MB stick of ram from my friend to see if Vista Beta 2 would run better, now it doesn't run at all).

Update: Alright, I just checked Dell's Website for a status on my service call. The last update was on the 14th! It looks like they're going to replace my video card and my processor (and yes, I like posting screen shots, gotta use that web space for something lol):

Alright, I have another update. The technician that Dell sent came by Tuesday and swapped the processor and gpu. Great. Processor ran at 2.0GHz at first but the GPU is still overheating and the fan does not work. Turns out the fan is a seperate part so the GPU really shouldn't have been replaced. I called Dell again and they ordered the fan and had it sent to the technician and they should be over to swap out the fan. Great. Now here's the kicker. CPU is stuck running at 800mhz again!! My laptop has been "off" for the last day or two.

Does anyone have any advice on what to tell Dell? This is driving me crazy because I "was" going to reinstall Vista again, but at this rate I won't be able to if the processor won't run correctly

No, sorry, that's not me.