[vox-tech] CPU stepping

[Jonathan Stickel]

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> So, last night I went to remind myself how fast Melissa's Thinkpad T20 was,
> and when I did "cat /proc/cpuinfo" I saw ~204MHz, which is about 500MHz
> slower than I remembered it being. :^)
> 
> I also saw "stepping: 3", so I guess the thing had kicked down a few speeds
> for power consumption.  The thing is, it was plugged in at the time.
> I tried with both the 'good' and 'bad' (doesn't hold a charge very long)
> batteries, to no avail.
> 

On my gentoo laptop, I have purposely installed something called
"powernowd".  It works with the kernel modules "cpufreq_userspace" and 
"cpufreq_powersave" to scale the cpu speed to reduce power consumption. 
  When I am idle, I get 498.387 Mhz.  When I run something significant 
(e.g. glxgears), I get my full spec, 1196.131 Mhz.  I'm not sure if this 
is related to your issue or not, but have you checked cpuinfo when 
running a full cpu load?

Jonathan