On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 12:57:45AM +0100, Ove Soerensen wrote:

> I'm wondering about us with the "non-enhanced" speedstep, there seems
> not to be any support for it? I understand this is a user-settable
> setting, linux and windows have some software for it, but not us...

perhaps it is better to leave the speedstep been used by
the bios itself. the previous one isn't as interesting
as the enhanced one, and basically you have the full speed
and the reduced speed. i use my thinkpad bios to set it
to either automatic (the more loaded the cpu is, the more
longer it keeps at full speed) or fixed slow speed (basically
running at fixed 50 % speed of the CPU).

i had done a test once about it. i had left the thinkpad under
automatic speedstep and used it extensively by compiling
various stuff, and it went up to 3h30. when used normally i
went up to 5 hours. then i set the cpu to fixed slow speed
and when used normally it went up to 5h30 so the gain is pretty
minimal and compiling stuff on the machine when set to half
speed size was very, very slow. so automatic mode seems the
best to me : you get almost as much autonomy as using
it at fixed speed, and you get the power boost for heavy
tasks when needed. when using it at slow speed i compiled
a kernel and the autonomy gain was badly lost by waiting
for the machine to do the compiling while in automatic it
would have only took 5 minutes :p