Significantly Low FSB Speed Than Whats Rated...

[supernerd]

I have just reinstalled Windows XP on a little netbook of mine. The Toshiba NB205-N311/W. It runs nice all-in-all, but I noticed it lags like crazy every now and again, and the cursor will slowly drag itself across the screen, programs take a while to execute and so-on. I was thinking about upgrading the hard drive to a solid state drive like I did with my other laptop. However I noticed the HDD activity light isn't all that busy when I execute programs and play music and video files, so a solid state drive would be a total waste of money. That lead me to believe it must be deep enough that it gets into the FSB of the system board, CPU, and RAM. Well I used a little program called CPU-Z and for some reason I found that my FSB is only at about 200MHz when it's rated for 667MHz. I thought it might be the CPU multiplier but there are no jumper settings on the system board. No settings in BIOS ether. I looked briefly through some software programs online that could quite possibly change this core setting but I found nothing. Any suggestions?

 

[Indigo]

That's a misnomer on the bus speed. Your bus doesn't actually run at 667 MHz, but an effective speed of 667. You're also using an Intel Atom CPU on that system, and contrary to what you state here, you WILL see a performance increase with an SSD, just don't expect to see across the board increases with a CPU that slow. You also probably don't want to run Windows XP on an SSD as it lacks the cleanup routines that Windows 7 has when running on an SSD.

In the grand scheme of things, there's likely nothing wrong with the system. We have several of these guys at work here and they are all pretty much good at one thing, giving you something to wait on while you go get a cup of coffee from the office coffee area.