I put together a Gateway solo 5300 from parts I picked up here and online. The thing runs great except I can't get the processor to change speeds when plugged into the power adapter. The cpu is an intel P3 mobile 1ghz that all the codes say should run @ 700mhz on battery and 1ghz on a/c power. The silly thing seems to be stuck at 700mhz. If I set the speedstep to anything other that disabled in the bios and reboot the system it gets all the way to the windows desktop and freezes. With it disabled of course windows works great but limited to 700mhz. The bios is out of date but I don't have a floppy drive for the computer yet so that I can update it, all the other drivers and utilities are up to date. If any of you guys have some experiance with this stuff please help me out.

system specs.
Gateway solo 5300 notebook
intel 1ghz P3 mobile sl5tf
gateway bios 22.06
motherboard is an intel i440bx mobile
OS, win 2000, all sp and updates.


Thanks guys, hopefully there is some setting that I am missing here and it will be a simple fix.

Is the processor getting super hot? I do know Speed-Step will lower the clock speed if it gets too hot.

I know with my laptop it wo uld always go to 800mhz if not under extreme load. Do this

Start
Control Panel
Performance And Matienence
Power Options
Select Always On
Apply
Ok

That system sounds familiar.......

Anywho, thats awsome that you pretty much rebuilt the whole thing. did you ever get a working screen for it.

Quote: Originally Posted by j-dogg Is the processor getting super hot? I do know Speed-Step will lower the clock speed if it gets too hot.

Wouldn't think it is. Having trouble finding a program that will work with this laptops mobo that will display the temps and such. It does this at basically zero cpu load.

Cpt., gave your idea a try and doesn't seem to help. after a restart the CPU still shows as a 700mhz.

Zer0s ,yep it's the one I got from you. Got another whole laptop, had a good screen but nothing else for 50 bucks. Picked up the 1ghz cpu and 256 of mem from members here.

I'm almost to the point of changing the motherboard out for the spare one I have and see if it's some screwy hardware issue. If I enable speedstep in the bios and set it to automatic, the computer will boot into windows. As soon as the desktop screen comes up, thats it, everything is locked up solid and it takes a hard restart to clear the problem. Kinda anoying to say the least.

It was my understanding that speedstep will change the cpu speed on the fly, so if you aren't using the processing power then it will default to the lower speed. If you run something CPU intensive and check the cpu speed at the same time it might show that the processor is jumping to the max when needed.
(does seem strange that when enabled in the bios it locks your PC though )

I am sure this is how it works with the new Pentium M cpu's and I'm pretty sure its how it worked with the P4 mobiles but I don't know what version of speedstep your cpu and mobo have.

Goodluck!

Ok, so a minor update. I went and changed out the motherboard and power supply. No dice. Still locks up when you try and get speedstep to increase from low level to high speed.

Next silly question,
Can I do a bios update from the cd drive? I don't have a floppy drive and I was wondering would the system boot from a cd and update the bios the same way as a floppy. Assuming I set the cd drive as first boot of course.

Hey all, thank you to everyone that tried to help me out with this one. I finally got the thing working at it's full potential. Found a program that allowed me to make a bootable cd with support for the bios flash utility. Flashed up to the current version from the cd drive and things are golden. Cpu now shows as a 1ghz in the bios, cpuz and speedstep. Speetstep works as advertised by dropping the cpu core speed down to 700mhz when on battery power and driving it up to 1ghz on the a/c adapter.