my Sister just got a shiny new laptop. It has an Athlon 1800+ cpu and shows in the BIOS as 1500 MHZ, which is correct, but windows XP is only showing it as a 689MHZ cpu....Any ideas why this is ?

Its to do with SpeedStep http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x967c84534efbd5118ff40090279cd0f9,00.html

Thanks for the reply.

I thought SpeedStep only affected Intel chips and this is an AMD. I will get her to alter the Power management setting to see what happens.

SpeedStep is a technology for Intel's Pentium range of processors, not AMD as stated, but I think we are almost on the right track here, the AMD Mobile XP also features power saving mode to reduce the speed of the clockspeed when running off battery.

But more importantly, the Mobile-XP are released almost a year after XP, so chances are, XP does not really 'understand' the communication when querying for information such as speed.

The things you could try, in Power setting, changing it from Laptop to Desktop and disable any energy saving features, just to see if this is the cause of the problem.

The other option to check if XP is really running at the full speed of the AMD-XP, is to install a copy of Sandra and do a bench test on the processor, again, just to narrow down the possibilities.

HTH

I talked her through it and by fiddling with the power setting we got it to show the correctish figure of 1.50 GIG. So it looks like it is the power management settings that are causing it.