E1505 Processor speed

Well, Do I feel like a Dummy. I did a little research and found that Dell uses an Intel driver, at least on the E1505, that is called Speedstep. The purpose of this driver is to clock down the processor when idle or very little load and instantly speeds up to the full speed or less depending on the load put on the processor. I checked it using Everest while performing a virus check and sure enough the CPU speed would throttle up and down from 997 mhz  to 1.667 ghz and stayed on the higher speed mostly. I monitored the temps and they were still reasonable, low 40C. I understand this is to save battery life and reduce heat. If you unplug the A/C adapter, it clocks down automatically to the lower setting. Looks like a very good approach. Many laptop users may already know this but some may not.

Thanks for you reply. I set the controls to Desktop and it still clocks down when idle. In the BIOS, the Performance setting on my system has two options. First is set Speedstep off which would make it run underclocked all the time and the other setting is Speedstep enabled, which lets its turn on or off depending on the load on the cpu. It is really not a problem now that I know it speeds up when needed. I confirmed this by opening Everest and then doing a virus scan. The cpu clocked up and down but stayed mostly on the full clock speed. I did notice it does this by changing the multiplier. It would change from 6 to 10 and the speed would jump accordingly. I also noticed the temps on the hard drive went up about 2 degrees celcius but the CPU remained constant. Thanks again.

If you set your Power scheme(Control Panel/Power Options) to Home/Office instead of Portable/Laptop your processor will operate at full speed all the time.

I leave mine on Laptop unless I'm playing a cpu/graphics intensive game.