I have a reasonable PC.
It's fast enough to do most things, including play most new games (probably mostly due to my graphics card), but some simple things like browsing a complicated web page or viewing a large PDF file take much longer than I would expect. And when I tried running Linux inside VMware it was so slow it was almost unusable.
I nearly bought a new CPU, but I decided to investigate first.
I opened the Windows Performance Monitor, and noticed that the CPU frequency bar was stuck at 47% (note the blue line in the graph below).
It turns out this was because I had previously enabled Windows power management to try to save power. In particular, I had chosen the Power Saver plan in order to get my computer to go to sleep as soon as possible, and even hibernate after a short time, so I could leave my computer on all day without using too much electricity.
It turns out this also limits the maximum speed my processor goes, a feature new to Windows Vista.
I tried running PCMark and got a pretty bad score of 2472.
I then set my minimum CPU speed to 50% and maximum to 100% and re-ran PCMark.
I got a much more respectable score of 3973.
Other people have managed up to 5109 PCMarks with similar hardware, so obviously there's still some room for improvement, but it certainly demonstrates how much the power management settings were holding the computer back.
I would recommend that people only use the Power Saver profile on laptops when battery life is the overriding concern. Most normal people should choose the Balanced or Performance settings from the main Power Plan settings page, then click on the Change plan settings link to change the sleep time.
It's fast enough to do most things, including play most new games (probably mostly due to my graphics card), but some simple things like browsing a complicated web page or viewing a large PDF file take much longer than I would expect. And when I tried running Linux inside VMware it was so slow it was almost unusable.
I nearly bought a new CPU, but I decided to investigate first.
I opened the Windows Performance Monitor, and noticed that the CPU frequency bar was stuck at 47% (note the blue line in the graph below).
Windows Performance Monitor With Power Management
It turns out this was because I had previously enabled Windows power management to try to save power. In particular, I had chosen the Power Saver plan in order to get my computer to go to sleep as soon as possible, and even hibernate after a short time, so I could leave my computer on all day without using too much electricity.
Windows Power Management Plan
It turns out this also limits the maximum speed my processor goes, a feature new to Windows Vista.
Advanced Power Options (Before)
I tried running PCMark and got a pretty bad score of 2472.
I then set my minimum CPU speed to 50% and maximum to 100% and re-ran PCMark.
Advanced Power Options (After)
I got a much more respectable score of 3973.
Other people have managed up to 5109 PCMarks with similar hardware, so obviously there's still some room for improvement, but it certainly demonstrates how much the power management settings were holding the computer back.
I would recommend that people only use the Power Saver profile on laptops when battery life is the overriding concern. Most normal people should choose the Balanced or Performance settings from the main Power Plan settings page, then click on the Change plan settings link to change the sleep time.
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