Help. A friend just bought a laptop from Best Buy, and it CPU is wrong.

[Chad]

Long story short... my friend picked up a new laptop at Best Buy. It was supposed to be a P4 1.6, but turns out it has a 910mhz (yeah I know wierd number) CPU in it. BB has said to bring it back to them and they will put a 1.6 in it, but he's scared that the whole system may be wrong now (video card, hard drive, ram etc.).

What should he do? He's not a techie, but is asking me.

 

[Oakenfold]

How did he verify that it's a 910?
Sounds like speedstep? Somebody else back me up on this as I've never owned a lappy.
It should just be the cpu adjusting for power consumption, not sure if aida or sandra picks up the actual proc speed on a lappy but I'd try those.

 

[limsandy]

I dont believe there is P4-900. Most likely, it's the sidespeed that's clocking down the CPU at idle.


~limsandy

 

[snidy1]

I think they run slower on batteries for less power consumption. Did you try with it pluged in?

 

[Corporate Thug]

also, the p4 has this option to run at a lower speed to save battery. if the laptop is an HP, you have to press a few keys to get it running @ 1.6

also, why not just return the whole thing and ask for a completely new one?

 

[PraetorianGuards]

Yeah...probably SpeedStep(or whatever they call it hehe). But does SpeedStep clock down to nearly half of its speed? Sounds a little extreme, but I'm not knowledgeable on SpeedStep. I remember that my POS Compaq had it but it only downclocked by 100Mhz(to 600).

Ah, but I remember when I bought a laptop from Fry's. A good learning experience. Not only did it have the wrong processor, but had half the memory and a smaller hdd...from then on I was smarter and actually made sure they weren't lying to me lol.

 

[compudog]

Speedstep is most likely the culprit. Try it plugged into AC power and see what he CPU is reported as.

 

[pukemon]

both pentium4-m and mobile athlon xp-m chips will dynaically throttle the cpu speeds to 4-5 different settings (when power management is set to default laptop/portable settings. my notebook drops down to 516MHz when it doesn't need to utilize the maximum cpu speed, and when it does it goes to 1.67GHz. (it is a mobile athlon xp2000+) intel's speedstep does the same thing.

 

[odog]

yeah sounds like speedstep to me...

my compaq n610c clocks from 2000mhz to 1200mhz to 717mhz... depending on how much battery i have left.

 

[addragyn]

If it's an XP machine: start > run > "cmd" > "systeminfo".

 

[Vadatajs]

My laptop goes from 1.8 to 1.2 due to speedstep, I've never had it go low yet.

 

[human2k]

Originally posted by: compudog
Speedstep is most likely the culprit. Try it plugged into AC power and see what he CPU is reported as.

 

[EeyoreX]

Long story short... my friend picked up a new laptop at Best Buy. It was supposed to be a P4 1.6, but turns out it has a 910mhz (yeah I know wierd number) CPU in it. BB has said to bring it back to them and they will put a 1.6 in it, but he's scared that the whole system may be wrong now (video card, hard drive, ram etc.).

What should he do? He's not a techie, but is asking me.

I agree, most likely SpeedStep.

Also, as a former BB PC Tech (before I moved on to better places) I find it odd that they would suggest they were going to "put in" a new CPU. This wouldn't happen at a BB store, they would just replace the laptop. Or check to verify that the CPU is wrong (software methods only). Just replace the entire machine if he is that worried about it.

\Dan