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AMD athlon PowerNow! problems

post #1 of 8
11/10/04 at 11:37pm
Thread Starter 
I have a compaq presario 2100 notebook (see stats at end), with an AMD athlon 2500+ XP-M. I get truly awful performance from this machine when it is running on battery power (system freezes after ~5 min when I am browsing [using firefox, not a clunky browser like IE], and it is impossible to use high-graphics aps, even halflife runs considerably more slowly). Compaq "tech" supprt said that this was due to AMD's PowerNow technology, and was a "feature", to save battery life, some feature! have others experienced this problem with AMD xp-Ms or is compaq just stupid? does anyone know how to fix this (short of just buying an ibook )? I also suspect that my ram may be too low (since it is shared graphics), but that doesn't explain the freezing while online, does it?

Compaq Presario 2172US
AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ @ 1.87 GHz
256 MG RAM (shared)
radeon 320M IGP
40 GB HD
15" monitor

Thank You,
--Alex
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post #2 of 8
11/11/04 at 1:10pm
Well, you really shouldn't be seeing too much slow down from processor throttling, it's supposed to throttle up when needed. However, I circumvented this feature by not using AMD's driver. I used the built in Athlon driver in XP. From what I understand, this feature has been improved in recent versions of the driver, however I see no real benefit from using AMD's driver as opposed to the default Windows driver.
Go to device manager and check your processor driver... if the driver provider is AMD, uninstall it, delete associated inf, and reboot.

Anyone have any more info on this?
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post #3 of 8
11/11/04 at 3:29pm
Thread Starter 
I checked, my driver provider is, in fact, microsoft.

I suspect, since it appears you have not had this problem, that my system memory is too low (256 shared). Does this make sense from a technical point of view?
--Alex
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post #4 of 8
11/11/04 at 4:25pm
Well, it really depends on what you are expecting from it.
More RAM is ALWAYS better, but 256 isn't going to be locking up.
Don't expect to play Doom or HL2 or do any high-end graphics design or 3d... but half life should run ok...
Max out your RAM if you can... and try installing AMD's drivers just for kix...
check your resident apps too... with that little RAM you definitely want to keep a close eye on what is open. I assume you've scanned for Spyware/Adware??
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post #5 of 8
11/12/04 at 9:55am
Thread Starter 
I have scanned for ad/spyware, but I will do so again, and see if that helps.
Thank you for your help,
--Alex
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post #6 of 8
11/12/04 at 10:01am
I have an averatec 3225 and did a benchmark test with cpu throttled and not throttled and I know what you mean.
Try using control panel/power and see if you can set it to dynamic switching or investigate a program called speedswitch-google it-works great on averatec amd based computers.
I really feel though that 512 ram is minimum for xp. Wastng your time with 256.
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post #7 of 8
11/12/04 at 3:29pm
If you want to stop the CPU throttling just set the Power Options in the control panel from Laptop / Desktop to Always On. This will force the CPU to run all the time at 2500+ speeds. It will lower your battery life a little, but I bet it'll only be by a few minutes.
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post #8 of 8
2/4/05 at 4:54pm
I have pretty much the hp equivalent to your notebook. I had some lock-up freezing issues before, but they were due to poor wireless card drivers. Mine wasn't powernow enabled, and I've been using speedswitch for about 4 months without issues
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