Power adapter slowing my laptop down

[kolosus]

I have a strange problem.

Until about 2 days ago (when I installed E17) everything was working fine. But now when my laptop is plugged in it slows down to a crawl. CPU usage goes up 50% (mainly by X) and overall the system is very sluggish, firefox takes forever to come up. I can type away and the letters take 2-3 seconds to materialize on the screen and so on.

Now if I unplug it, meaning let the laptop work on battery power then everything returns to normal, or rather to the state before this problem materialized. CPU usage goes down to about 14% with firefox, kopete and some other minor stuff going on.

Now this adapter is a "generic" one. Its not HP branded. I'm using a HP TC4400 tablet. With 3 gigs of ram. I also have another 2 gigs of swap, but I'm sure that's immaterial, on my worst day I've never used any swap space.

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5600 (1.83 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache)
Mobile Intel® 945GM Express
3 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
500 GB 5400 rpm SATA
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950

I'm at a loss here folks. I'm almost ready to throw in the towel and do a reformat of the computer to see if things return to normal. Throw me some ideas here please. Thanks.

[pelone]

That is an odd one, have you tried a live cd (possibly another distro) without E17? If not I would give that a try. If running a live cd , see if you have any processes running with your adapter in use that you do not have under battery only.

[TBABill]

Check your performance settings. Is it possible you changed your "on AC power" setting to operate at the slowest speed your processor can run at? This is something you'd probably only want when your battery is maybe 20% or less, but it could have errantly been adjusted to that setting on normal AC power.

Click "configure your desktop" icon (wrench and screwdriver), then Advanced user settings, then Power Management. On the right side under general settings, what is set for "When AC Adaptor is plugged in"? Mine is set to performance. If yours is set to something like Xtreme Powersave could that be scaling you back on the CPU?

This is all just a guess. I was playing around with CPU settings and came across these settings last night so it came to mind when I read your post. If this isn't it I'm out of ideas....still pretty new to PCLinuxOS myself.

[ageilers]

I am having a similar issue on an IBM X31, however, it is happening all the time. My X CPU cycles between 10-40%.

[kolosus]

I'm at a loss here. I doubt if it can be solved by a livecd boot up. The reason I say that is because this laptop has a total of 5 operating systems loaded on it (PCLos09, PCLos10, E17, XP and a version of slackware). All the OSs share the same problem, or maybe symptoms. I haven't tried a live cd because of the fact that this laptop doesn't come with a built in cd drive. I have to use an external and that's a pain to setup.

I do have another adapter and that works fine. When I plug it in there is no change in cpu usage. But the problem with this adapter is that it doesn't charge my battery. The one that does charge my battery makes my cup usage go nuts and the computer is noticeably slowed.

I'm not sure what information to give as I'm not sure what's relevant. If you think something is relevant and the info isn't provided please ask.

But I think it may be a hardware issue and not a software solvable problem.

[GuypronouncedGuynotGuy]

check your ACPI settings in the bios, perhaps disable it to test.

[luikki]

remove the battery from the laptop and see if you have the same symptoms with power from any of the adapters...

if it works well... time for a new battery...

note: from the symptoms you describe your touchpad should also  be working erratically. pls. test.

[kolosus]

Removing the battery had no effect luikki. Same problem. The problem charger makes my cpu go nuts. The non problem charger doesn't charge my battery. I'm starting to think that the generic charger has just gone belly up.

I'm ordering another charger. Hope this one lasts longer.