Trying to disable Speedstep

What model of Eeepc and what flavour of Linux are you running on it?

As Mr.T asks, it would be helpful to know exactly which model laptop you're running and what flavor of Linux you use. The reason is that there are several methods for controlling speed-step.

In just about any flavor of Linux the most basic way to manage speed-step is to only build "performance-governor" in your kernel. This would permanently lock your processor at maximum performance with all that would entail including running hotter and dramatically reduced battery life.

If you're running a relatively current distro with a recent version of KDE-4 as your window manager you can lock speed-step to it's highest level on an as-needed basis through the "Power Management" applet in your "system settings". This would be a preferred method as you can easily return to power saving modes at a click of the mouse. All you would need to do is select "performance" mode which disables basic power management. You can even further fine tune other settings from within this applet.

Unfortunately, I haven't used Gnome in over 8 years so I can't help you there. I can say though that if you run XFCE4 as your environment but also have KDE4 and use KDM to log-in, then you can still use the KDE power management applet to control speed-step.

You can also control speed-step from the command line using pm-utils. There are various commands that can force different power management features depending on what you've got built into your kernel.

On my machine I've set the default governor to "conservative" but have built in the other governors as modules that can be called upon when I desire to use them. I like "conservative" because it gradually raises and lowers performance as needed by my machine instead of spiking it. This gives me the power management I need, but performance when I need it as well.

I hope this helps.

Ciao