New Computer 2

After 2 weeks of fiddling with the laptop, I finally arrived at a satisfied state. Here is what I did:

1. I reformatted the harddrive. The original installation was somewhat screwed-up. My taskbar would suddenly not display any open programs. Creating a new account would solve it, but it would reoccur in a while. After numerous account deletion and re-creation, I got fed-up. Also, there were lots of programs installed but I don’t use. After reformatting it, it works perfectly now. I also partitioned my harddrive into two partitions in the meanwhile, one for Windows and programs, the other for my documents, so I don’t have to backup everything all the time.
2. I undervolted my cpu. Before, it would hang/crash all the time whenever it switched between FIDs/VIDs. I tried undervolting less, but no help. After talking to a friend, who suggested that it might be a driver problem, I uninstalled the AMD driver for my cpu and just used the RightMark CPU Clock Utility to undervolt and manage my cpu. It works! Now it doesn’t crash, and I can undervolt quite a bit. Below are my current settings, both of which seem to be stable:

   Undervolted1 | Undervolted2 | CLOCK =
   FID   VID    | FID   VID    | FIDx200
   4x    0.975V | 4x    0.950V | 800MHz
   5x    1.025V | 5x    1.000V | 1000MHz
   6x    1.075V | 6x    1.050V | 1200MHz
   7x    1.150V | 7x    1.125V | 1400MHz
   8x    1.200V | 8x    1.175V | 1600MHz
   9x    1.250V | 9x    1.225V | 1800MHz
   

   CLOCK = | Original
   FIDx200 | FID   VID
   800MHz  | 4x    1.075V
   1000MHz | 5x    1.125V
   1200MHz | --    ----
   1400MHz | --    ----
   1600MHz | 8x    1.300V
   1800MHz | 9x    1.350V
   

   Compared to the original settings, the cpu uses 0.100V and 0.125V less respecitively. Nice. I have yet to test out the battery life increase.

By the way, the specs of the notebook:

• CPU: Mobile Sempron 3000+ @ 1.8GHz
• RAM: 512MB PC2700
• Chipset: ATi RADEON® XPRESS 200M IGP with 128MB DDR (shared)
• HDD: 60GB
• Display: 14.0" WXGA BrightView Widescreen

As mentioned before, not the fastest computer, but adaquet for my needs. The ATi graphics, although integrated, is decent.

Wow, lots of technical jargon. But see, I can write about these things a lot more then about others things.