AMD Sempron Clock Speed

Hi there,

I'm not sure whether this should be in the Acer forums, but I have an Aspire 3003 with the Sempron 3000+ processor, and for some reason it's been stuck on the maximum clock speed for a few weeks now, even though it should be running idle. Obviously this means a pretty bad hit on batter life, as well as fan noise. I'm fresh out of ideas- I've tried updating the bios as well as the various drivers from AMD for regulating the CPU speed. Anyone have any ideas?

 

I presume if you've updated the BIOS then you've checked the bios speedstep settings?

It's possible that a third party application that also has speedstep control is changing the cpu settings in the OS. Do you have any applications like Notebook Hardware Control installed? That and other programs like power management software can affect speedstep settings.

 

That's the thing... as far as I can tell, there aren't any settings within the BIOS itself for regulating the PowerNow! or Cool n' quiet settings, and I don't have any other power regulating software installed. It's due for a reformat soon anyways, so I could always try that, but I'd still like to figure out what the issue is in case it happens again. I'm not familiar with how the speed regulation works, but are there any registry entries that may have been changed somehow? Or maybe my computer just doesn't like me.

 

That is strange, AMD machines I have owned have had BIOS settings for those.

I'd say try checking power management software as something as mundane as cpu power settings in that could affect your Powernow.

Apart from that I'm afarid I'mout of suggestions, sorry!

 

No worries. I've considered selling this laptop for a while in favor of a smaller one, so I'll probably format it anyways. Thanks anyways for the advice, I'll look around one more time in the BIOS.

 

I had the same problem, and all I had to do was to go download the driver from AMD and that fixed it.