More intelligent power management?

[CefiroZ]

I currently have my Windows power settings to be using a customized version of the Portable/Laptop scheme. The main reason I use this on my desktop PC is for the adaptive CPU scaling to save on electricity. My CPU is 2GHz and scaling cuts it back to 1GHz. My problem is that Windows isn't smart enough. If I keep distributed.net (or F@H or whatever) disable, my CPU pretty much stays at 1GHz and is idle most of the time. I think sitting idle at 1GHz is a complete waste but when d.net or F@H is running it registers as 100% CPU usage, which makes the power management kick the CPU up to full blast. Is there a way to have low priority processes like these use the full CPU but not cause the power management to bump up the frequency? I'd really like to get full CPU usage while also minimizing my electricity usage. Thanks!

 

[thrawn86]

have you played with the process priority settings in f@h? I'm not sure what the activity cutoff % is to ramp up the cpu speed, but if you figure that out you could set your target cpu usage to that value.