R61 - Windows 7 64bit speedstep broken?

Hello everyone - long time lurker first time poster as the usually greatly helpful search results didn't cut it this time. Thanks for all those great results so far.

I have a 2.5+ year old Thinkpad R61 (14.1" T7250, 7732-CTO) and I love the machine. Until two days ago, the laptop was set to dual boot between Fedora and Ubuntu with 99.9% of the time spent in Ubuntu. Two days ago, I swapped out the SATA 120GB drive for an Intel 2nd gen SSD (80GB) and installed Windows 7 Ultimate N (don't laugh, "free" thanks to MSDN) 64bit and Ubuntu 9.10.

On Ubuntu 9.10, the on-demand CPU setting shuttles between 800MHz and 1.6GHz for most part (browsing, codeblocks/gedit+gcc plus a few open documents). The laptop barely gets warm when in Ubuntu. However I've almost had it with the state of debugging / IDEs in Linux and the reason for installing Win7 was to play around with VS 2010 (which admittedly is more resource intensive than codeblocks or Anjuta for Linux) but for some darned reason, I cannot get Windows 7's power management to work.

I've played around with the power management options, downloaded Lenovo's power management driver/tool but I cannot get the CPU to step down to lower frequencies. As a result, the laptop gets considerably warmer forcing me back to gcc . No matter what I do, the CPU runs at 1994-1995MHz when in Windows.

Has anyone else seen this issue and if so, do you have a suggestion for me? Apart from cpp code, I want to move onto C# and while mono is great, I'd rather spend some time with VS.

Thanks for reading the rather long post.

 

I tried one last thing - updated the BIOS to a more recent version and lo behold, 798MHz in Windows 7. It does puzzle me why Ubuntu never complained (8.04 to 9.10) but I am good now. The bios version made me look up the actual age of the laptop - the machine will be 3 years old in 3 months. <3 Thinkpads.