Thought I'd tell this story in case it helps anyone else. Sorry if it's stating the obvious to some people, but someone might appreciate the tip.

I recently noticed that one of my laptops, a Dell Inspiron 1150, has a very low RAC compared to what I'd expect. Looking closer, I noticed that the CPU benchmark shown in BOINC is only around 600 most of the time, but when switched on from cold, can be as high as 1350 before reducing to 600 again soon after.

Using "ThrottleWatch", I discovered that the CPU is throttled back to 50% most of the time, and sometimes down as low as 25%, reducing a 2.6GHz machine to a 650MHz one at times. No wonder its output has been low. Using "hmonitor", I confirmed what I thought: The CPU (Intel Celeron) was running at up to 75C, and having to throttle back to get below 72C.

I took the keyboard off and removed the heatsink assembly, cleaned a *lot* of dust out of the heatsink, cleaned up the old dried-on thermal paste, and reapplied some Arctic Silver 5. Put the whole lot back on, and the CPU has been running at 100% ever since, max temperature down from 75C to 58C. Not surprisingly, the fan speed is much lower, so the whole thing is quieter.

Lesson: If you have a machine running slower than you think it should, use software like ThrottleWatch and hmonitor to see if it's too hot and throttled back. If so, and you're comfortable working with hardware, then a good cleanup of the heatsink and new thermal paste may make a big difference. In my case, it's doubled the output of one of my machines.

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Alver Valley Software Ltd - Contributing ALL our spare computing power to BOINC, 24x365.

Yes I recently did a similar thing to a Pentium4-m based laptop and it was only a 1.6GHz P4.

So (and especially P4's) if you think something wrong check the throttling.

I used RMClock http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml which also allows you to override the throttle if really needed. To check it was the throttling.

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Team mauisun.org

It's a bit off topic, but i use RMClock permanently on my laptop to keep the voltage at 1.053V rather than the standard 1.3V which means it runs much cooler and longer battery life between charges.

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