Right driver for cpufreq

[Kevin Freeman]

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 14:18 -0700, Mitko Haralanov wrote: 
> Hi, I just installed Fedora Core 2 on my Dell Latitute C800 laptop and I
> having trouble getting the cpu frequency scaling to work. The
> /proc/cpuinfo file shows the cpu as:
> 
> processor       : 0
> vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
> cpu family      : 6
> model           : 8
> model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
> stepping        : 10
> cpu MHz         : 997.943

You may be out of luck - what is the output of:
# dmesg|egrep '(440|cpufreq)'

On my 5000e I get:
cpufreq: Intel(R) SpeedStep(TM) for this chipset not (yet) available.
agpgart: Detected an Intel 440BX Chipset.

Intel, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to _NOT_ publish enough specs
on the 440BX chipset to allow a driver to be produced for Linux.  
http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2002/Oct/9211.html 

> I would really appreciate any help since I have to go on a trip and I
> will need to use the laptop but under current setup, the battery last
> about 5 seconds.

Try booting on battery power - on my laptop this drops the CPU to 600MHz
(from the default 1GHz) for the entire session.  Maybe your battery can
last 7-8 seconds now!  ;)  A new battery will bring new life to your
laptop.  After my laptop's battery life dropped to < 30 minutes I bought
a new battery.  Now it lasts 3 to 3.5 hours on a full charge, at 1GHz.
I have not configured laptop-mode or any other power-saving techniques.

Visit this page http://www.poupinou.org/cpufreq/speedstep-piix4.html if
want to experiment to try to get speedstep working.  I have not yet
attempted this.

Good luck,
Kevin