need help dell inspiron 8500 cpu speed

[Calgary]

Hi all. I just bought an inspiron 8500 from a co-worker. Great deal 'cause the battery is toast and is missing a shift key. It has a cpu of 2.4 GHz but only ever runs on 1.2. I know this computer changes speed as needed but BIOS says the current speed is 1.2 always. Is there a way to get it to 2.4? Does it have to do with the dead battery? Also, I can't install the Bios update from the Dell site because the laptop doesn't think the battery is there, because it's dead. Any help would be great. I know i do need a battery, however.

[Nechen]

You can't touch anything on proprietary machines like Dell, once its set its set unless theres some other way I'm not aware of. You might have one awesome paperweight if its stuck at 1.2 lol

[j12]

I think the core is a pentium 4 right? Does anyone know if the pentium 4's have stepping technology. It could be that it is stepping down the speed of your cpu to conserve power, many laptops have this feature.

[Alvin.C]

Hello,

Only the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 M processors have SpeedStep technology. As I know it, the Dell Inspiron 8500 has a Mobile Intel Pentium 4 M 2.4 Ghz processor.

What does the BIOS identify the processor as? (As in the name / model).

The best thing to do to is boot into Windows and run CPU-Z , to make sure the the system has identified the processor correctly. You could also try running some power hungry applications and see if the CPU speed throttles up.

Also, check to see if there's a CPU throttling program running (one that lets you choose different performance profiles like power saver and high performance, thereby restricting clock speeds).