Heyho, I hope I came to the right forum here, if not, feel free to move it or whatever :) Lately I've been having some problems with my Dell Inspiron 5150 (Laptop). Whenever I enter a fullscreen application (mainly games) the framerates will drop suddenly, because the 'system' process starts hogging CPU usage, taking CPU usage from the game.exe and thus making it slower. Well I've been trying to figure out what the problem could be and then when I checked out dxdiag, I found the following: [quote = dxdiag] ... Processor: Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz, ~1.6GHz ... [/quote] Basicly my 3.06Ghz processor is runnning at a little over half it's speed, at 1.6 Ghz. I don't know if this is the reason for my above problem, but this could be a problem of it's own. Does anyone have a clue why it may be doing that? Maybe power-saving reasons? Any help greatly appreciated, Thanks, DeaconEire

have you check your bios to make sure ou have the right multipler selected Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

are you running on ac power or battery when this happens? you may just be using steedstep.

Laptops CPU speed varies depending on load...this saves battery power & helps it to run cooler...what you're seeing is normal. Also, laptops rarely play games well, unless you specifically buy a "gaming laptop" ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

Sorry for taking so long to reply, but I'm on GMT timezone and in bed, when you replied :P Thanks@mike Anyways, the good news is, it turns out that if I let the laptop run off the battery it will go @1.6ghz and if I run off the power socket it goes @3.1ghz, apparently you don't even have to reboot for it to change (which I find hard to believe) The bad news is, that this had nothing to do with my other problem. And if the game(s) didn't run smoothly for 20-30 seconds, before this 'system' process starts using CPU time, then I would just say the laptop is too slow. Sometimes it will even run for a minute or 2 before slowing down... Thanks for any tips, DeaconEire

Check in Control Panel > Power Options. You should be able to disable the Intel Speedstep. There should also be power settings in your BIOS. BUT - you will not run as long when on battery only. Rule #1 Good computers don't go down. Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.

well i have almost the same problem with my PC. i got a AMD Athlon 2800+ which is 2.14 or so? and right now its running at 1.2 gHz, i tried to set it to use "default settings" in the BIOS but that didnt fix da problem and i have no clue wut else to do. But i dont think i should let it run at half speed so if any1 can help pls do and keep in mind that im not too good in fixin PC problems so the more details the better. I did see the section where u can set the CPU multiplier but i dunno wut does mine need, my motherboard type is: "asus a7n8x deluxe" - also wut i never heard b4, at startup, i hear a voice bout memory load successful [at time not],...booting from system something..sry for the missing parts. thx in advance