I'm not exactly where this belongs, but w/e.

My dad just recently purchased a Dell Inspirion 1500 with a Pentium4 3.06 GHz processor. The fastest it has run at is 1.594 GHz, is there anyway to force the CPU to run faster or would it be better to just send it back?

First and foremost, I must apologise for being a new user to the forum giving advice. Here it goes. . .

Assuming that you are seeing a clock speed of 1.5 or so GHz in the BIOS, call a Dell representative, tell him what you are experiencing, and ask him if that's a glitch in which the BIOS on the Dell motherboard is misreporting the CPU clock speed. It happens quite a bit with some of the AMD processors, but this is weird for a P4.

If this is not the solution, a prompt return of the comp should be in order, as you were not supplied with the correct processor and/or it is defective.

I have built six P4 computers and never had anything like this happen.

Good luck getting the issue resolved.

Cheers,
HappyFunnyFoo

That's right, don't even try to fix it yourself. That never works.

Bus seriously, mess around with your BIOS settings a bit and see if you can get the clock speed to jump up. You might also try checking if there is an update for your BIOS; I sincerely doubt that will fix it as BIOS updates almost exclusively contain new drivers, but it's much easier and takes much less time than returning the computer.

GL HF. :)

Isn't Inspiron a laptop? Maybe it's a power-save feature that it doesn't run the CPU at full speed unless it's been running at 100% cpu use for X time? Check with Skywing since he has a Dell laptop too.

My friend has a laptop that runs at lower speed when it's running off the battery and at full speed when it's plugged into the wall.

Ya, my Inspiron 2ghz runs mostly at 1.2ghz. It's called SpeedStep. Try running WarcraftIII or something that will use it more and then check it.

Ok, thnx for the help. We had already called Dell & all they did was tick my dad off by putting him obn hold for 40 minutes.

Well, did they eventually give you a good answer?

Nope, they just tried to avoid a direct answer. I think my dad said that they said it may go faster but he looked at a Toshiba at our Best Buy & the System Stats said it was running at it's processor's declared speed.

I dont think you can put a pentium 4 in a labtop. I thought thats why intel has a mobile line of processors. I cant imagine a labtop providing the proper cooling for that processor. Thats probably why you are getting lower speeds. Anyway if I am wrong you should do the folowing.

edit: I am wrong so try doing this stuff

First you should try flashing the bios. If you still get low mhz speeds do the following.

Go into the bios and find the cpu freq field (also may be known as some sort of bus speed). This can probably be found under advanced chip settings. It should be set on auto and picking 133 or possibly 533 (which would realy be 133). Also your multiply rate thing should be on auto but if you bother folowing this step please check what it is picking and post back. Anyway dont change anything. If you do this just post what those were set on. Im realy tired so sorry about any typos

How can you determine what speed your computer is running at?

If you have XP, go into control panel-system and it will display it.

Zellar- I believe he meant the P4-M.

I didnt even realize they realesed a p4-m. Ill edit my post above since I origanaly wrote it for the non mobile version of the p4.