Dell Inspiron 1721

[kenmha]

About a week ago I purchased a used laptop from a friend. After whipping out his install of Windows 7 in favor of Ubuntu, I noticed it was very slow to start up. So, I added the CPU frequency applet (which reports only 800mhz). The laptop has an AMD Turion TL-56 which has a max speed of 1.80ghz, however, I cannot get remotely close even with POWERNOW disabled. The same 800mhz speed is reported in CPU-Z also in the BIOS as the bare minimum speed that the cpu can operate. This is really frustrating! The BIOS has been updated to A07 which was released in 2008

 

[kenmha]

Hmm, I think I figured it out. After fiddling around in the BIOS, upon rebooting, the system warned me that a 65W power adapter was being used and not the original 90W. Therefore, the system wouldn't perform as expected. Perhaps this bit of information can be beneficial to someone else

 

[WR2]

Thanks for the update kenmha;

That little tidbit is an unusual 'gotcha'.