This is an old Dell Inspiron 7500 with an Intel PIII - (Coppermine) running debian 'lenny'.
The hardware supports an early version of the SpeedStep technology that makes it possible to switch clocking between 650MHz and 500MHz. This is normally done via a BIOS option where the focus appears to be on battery life. Since the batteries are long dead and will not be replaced, I'm more looking into trying to lower the laptop's temperature a bit by having it either throttle the CPU, or put to sleep whatever components are not strictly necessary, when I'm not using the system.. or doing what I'm doing now - interacting at a snail's pace with my mailer, trying to sensibly describe my problem to debian-user. Initially, when I tried linux, I figured that this laptop was just too old and would not support any of the acpi stuff at all except perhaps for the very basics, such a keeping track of the CPU's temperature, or powering off the machine at the end of the shutdown procedure - which is basically the two (useful) features that I have so far successfully been using. But then, prompted by a recent post on this list where s/o wanted to control a noisy fan via software, I took another look at relevant files, both in the /proc and /sys trees, and found stuff that looked promising, initially at least - hinting at different "available" states, and throttling capabilities in particular indicating I could clock the processor down to as little as 12% of its native capability. Unable to find any clear answers as to how I should go about doing that, even after an extended "Google Advanced Search" session, I eventually installed such packages as "cpudyn" and "cpufreqd" mainly hoping that their documentation and playing with them a bit might help clarify. I was unable to get these programs to do anything that I could see, the system seems to be stuck in the "P0:T0" state and that's that.. As part of the "apt-get cpufreqd" .. debian even refused to start the daemon, suggesting that the system is not properly configured - lsmod indeed does not show that anything relative to these functionalities has been loaded. Is the system misconfigured, are the capabilities I'm looking into not available for my hardware, and the /sys/ & /proc/ files I looked at mere generic placeholders that have no meaning on my system? I took a look at /lib/modules and tried to guess which module might be the correct one from my particular hardware - and then decided it was time to take a break. Rather than waste more time speculating, I thought that maybe someone who has been down this road already might be able to comment on feasibilty with comparable hardware and possibly direct me to the relevant manuals. Thanks, CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
