default cpuspeed and FC2 on laptop permanently slow

[Trevor Smith]

I have a Presario 2197CA with an AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ with a max speed of 
around 2ghz. FC1 was very snappy on it. When I upgraded to FC2 I noticed it 
was much slower (I use KDE). I had always thought KDE took a step backwards, 
but lately I began playing with cpuspeed, which is installed and turned on by 
default with FC2, and I realized that cpuspeed is the problem.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

reports the minimum cpu speed for my processor *at all times* when cpuspeed is 
running.

After I killed it, cpu speed jumps immediately to its max. A different 
power/speed monitor/daemon, powernowd (suggested by someone on this list) 
worked much better, actually doing dynamic cpu speed setting, as it (and 
cpuspeed) is supposed to.

cpuspeed is either broken or someone at FC2 set it wrong so it always keeps 
things running super slowly. I haven't tried to find cpuspeed info or howto 
yet, but thought folks might like to know about this in case they too think 
that FC2 and/or KDE is "slow".

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com