Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.games (More info?)

I have a:

Dell Inspiron 9300 running XP Media Center 2005
Pentium M 760 - 2Ghz
2 Gb RAM
nVidia GeForce Go 6800 256 Mb

Saturday, I downloaded Age of Empires III trial. After installing, I ran
the program and an error message popped up stating that I didn't have the
necessary processor speed to run the game. It said my processor was running
at around 500 Mhz (a high reading was just below 700 Mhz and a low reading
was just above 300 Mhz). I thought that because it was a trial, they hadn't
worked out the kinks. Yesterday, a friend lent me Star Wars Republic Comando
and I received the same message. I called Dell support and after running a
couple of tests, the gentleman I spoke to said, that I was running at my 2Ghz
and there was nothing he could do.

I've run several other games (Doom 3, Knights of the Old Republic, Far Cry)
with no problems.

What is it about AoE III and SW Republic Comando that is preventing me from
playing these games? Are there processes running in Media Edition that are
causing conflicts?

Andrew your proccessor speed as indicated by DELL says its a 2.0 GHz plenty to run Age Of Empires however you need to call the DELL help desk I think what is wrong is your CPU is set to a low setting in the computers BIOS.

I dont want to go into detail about how to set it to 2.0 GHz here as I am not sure you know how to do it or have done it before because you would have checked it your self by now.

Call DELL they will help you set it properly.

You can also do this and get back to me.

Right click on MY COMPUTER see if it says the CPU is running at 2.0GHz if it says 500MHz as the game is telling you then it is a problem with a setting in the computers BIOS and call DELL.

Let me know thnx.

P.S some times games wrongly detect CPU speed and it is the games fault not the computers but if it is right and you fix it with DELL's Help your other games will ROCK!!

Since you're using a P-M processor, it's probably "speed-stepping" to save power. This can be disabled either in BIOS or with Intel's software within Windows.

The RDTSC processor instruction on a HAL processor in Windows XP is needed for proper code profiling.

However the game detecting a lower MHz or GHz is not the fault of RDTSC it is the fault of the game the same way Steams Source engine wrongly detects CPU speeds on both Intel and AMD processors. That is why I asked him to check in properties on a right click of My Computer or he could check in the DirectX Diag to see what the CPU speed really is set to in relation to the BIOS.