AMD 64 3500 clocked at < 1.0 GHz?

[Heretic]

A friend of mine recently gave me a laptop of his to look at. He said it was running terribly slow, so I did the usual and scaned for all manners of spyware and viruses.

 

NOTHING (very weird) but he says he only uses Firefox and rarely searches the dark questionable depths of the Internet. Fair enough. He had Norton Systemworks 2005 installed, with CheckIt diagnostics. I figured it was a useless program, but tried it anyway.

 

Apparently it clocks his CPU speed at 950 MHz? That's pretty damn slow for a 64 bit processor. I was wondering if this had anything to do with the fact CheckIt is a bad program or if it's possible some safety feature to conserve energy is causing his processor to run at a slower speed.

 

Of course I checked the BIOS. The settings were on the default, and the computer speed could not be adjusted (according to the BIOS it should be running at 2.2 GHz the computer does not in anyway run that fast.

 

He had taken it to the shop but they said nothing was wrong and charged him $50 since the warranty doesn't cover cost if there's nothing wrong with the laptop. Since then he's afraid to take it anywhere else.

 

Any advice?

[insane_alien]

sure thats not the FSB? try a program called everest, http://www.lavalys.com/

just use the free version, its an awesome specs program gives you everything.

[JaKiri]

It's a function of Athlon 64 processors*. When there's no load on the processor, it lowers the clock speed to extend both processor and battery life.

 

There is nothing wrong with the laptop.

 

*http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9487%5E10272,00.html

[JaKiri]

sure thats not the FSB?

 

A 950MHz FSB? Are you insane? Even ignoring that it would have to have a mere 3x multiplier, that's more than twice what the top of the range socket 939 motherboards can do if you get an especially good one. Three or more times what normal high end boards do.

[insane_alien]

ummm... yeah... my bad. /me hides his PC for a few years.

[chemfreak]

Say that they umm broke it?? Maby that it got stolen in a terrible robery?? or You could just send it over to me!!!!

[insane_alien]

actually... with a bit of research(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_side_bus) FSB clocks of 1.25GHz are possible. so