I’ve got an older laptop with a P-4M that I don’t use often, simply because it’s big, loud (fan blowing all the time) and hot. It’s been running breezy as a testbed, but hasn’t been off my desk in AGES.

Last night I discovered the “p4-clockmod” kernel module. This sucker will autothrottle your P4-M very agressively for power management purposes, and it seems to work well in the limited testing I’ve been able to throw at it.

If you want to try it; do the following: * Add the gnome frequency monitoring applet to your panel. * “sudo vi /etc/modules”, then add “p4-clockmod” (no quotes) at the beginning of the list of modules * save the file and reboot

The kernel will use the p4-clockmod governor rather than the speedstep one, and on a P4-M the difference is huge. This P4 2.0Ghz would only throttle down to 1.2Ghz under speedstep, but under p4-clockmod I’ve seen it go as low as 150Mhz! lm_sensors has reported a much cooler running temperature, and the fans haven’t kicked on nearly as often. I gotta believe that this will improve battery life.