laptop dog slow

[bibble]

Anyone heard of this one? I had a laptop in for repair which ran win98 but had horrendous slowdowns in everything from windows to DOS and even the bios screen. I initially presumed it was an install rubbished by adware and viruses which I found in droves. There was even one called killcmos.com.

The thing that seems to have fixed it is taking the battery out and just running off of the mains? Why on earth would that be? The battery holds it charge according to the led meter on the side...

any ideas?

[Fat Tone]

What's the clock speed when on battery?

[bibble]

its only 500mhz - did they have speed step etc back then?

[Fat Tone]

If I remember correctly, I had a Toshiba Tecra 500MHz with Speedstep.

[bibble]

hmmm could be it - its running a disk check at the moment and annoyingly restarts if i move the mouse (says it has an hour left) so I will have look then. I didnt notice anything in device manager for it - where would it be?

[Fat Tone]

Sorry I don't recall, but the system tray would be a good start

[bibble]

bios maybe thinking about it

[bibble]

ugh thing just jumped up by 30 mins ... tv time i think

[schmosef]

You might be able to download the speedstep utility installer from your laptop manufacturer's web site. You also might be able to turn it off (or configure part of it) in bios.

[bibble]

as soon as this stupid surface scan is finished thats what i will do but it now says 1:07 to go... ugh personally i think its lying - there are only about 1 mill sectors left which at makes it about 10 mins left...

[agallag]

There's only a speedstep utility in win2k. XP supports it natively so there's no utility or tray applet.

[bibble]

hmm nothing in the bios, could it just be a dud battery or just that the laptop is old and something in there is knackered. I think i will go with that unless anyone else can make a guess?

[schmosef]

I don't think this applies to you but my laptop is slower under XP than it was running ME (but much more stable) because of some sort of problem with the chipset and some subsystem returning data when not requested (I don't remember the exact details). Apparently it's only since XP that Windows doesn't like this; XP is constantly writing entries into the event log to complain about the situation. The process of writing entries into the log slows down whatever foreground tasks are running. Microsoft's answer is to ask your vendor for a bios upgrade but Asus stopped releasing upgrades for my model before XP was released.

My laptop was a PIII 500Mhz but it had a zif type (I think it was called micro zif) cpu socket and I was later able to upgrade it to an 850Mhz cpu, which wasn't even available when I bought the laptop.

All in all, I'm happy with my Asus laptop. Recently my Asus distributor, Supercom, announced a zero dead pixel policy on all Asus portables. I hope the rest of the industry follows suit.

Look in your event log to see if there are a lot of entries complaining about a noisy controller.

[bibble]

windows 98 am afraid - he doesnt have a licence/disks for anything else. That wouldnt explain the slowdown in the bios though.

[Fat Tone]

Have you run wcpuid or simillar to see what the clock speed actually is?