Arbitrary Processor Downclock

Here is the CPU-Z screen:


I am running Windows 7 Pro, 32 bit.
The performance I should be getting from my two cores is around 2.2 GHz, but the clock speed has been reduced to 600 MHz for reasons unknown to me.
The problem happened randomly. Upon sleeping and then awakening my laptop, I noticed a drastic performance drop. It should be noted that this problem has cropped up before; a system restore to before the problem resolved it. Since, however, it has now happened again, I would like any suggestions on how to find the root of the problem. I don't run any utilities for overclocking, and the power management settings in Windows are not causing the problem. Thanks in advance for your help.

It is probably Intel speed step kicking in. It will lower your process speeds (CPU clock multiplier), depending on the load of the cores, in order to conserve power - which is something you want on a laptop. It will ramp up the clock when you need it.

To see if this is the case, go to your power options from in control panel, choose change plan settings then choose change advanced power settings.

I forget what the setting is under there (it does not show up on mine because I have speedstep disabled), but somewhere there should be a setting for the minimum process speed in percent. You can basically disable speedstep by setting it to 100%, but that probably would drain your battery pretty quickly.

That was the first thing I checked. I made a new thread because I suspect that Speedstep isn't the culprit; The power settings are as they should be, and the processor performance isn't ramped up when there is a load on it.

The problem is fixed. It looks like running sfc (System File Checker) from the command line fixed the problem. Running it once when I found the problem didn't work, but I ran it again, and voila. I suspected that the problem stemmed from a downclock in the BIOS, for possible thermal reasons, but I guess not.

I thought the minimum multiplier for this CPU was 6, top 10.5. That is the maximum bus speed of the processor (200MHz). Do you actually see a performance degradation? Could CPU-Z be mis-reporting?

No, there was a significant performance degradation. The clock seen by CPU-Z was the same as another clocking utility I have.

Odd. Now how do you think the something in Windows affects how the the hardware runs? I expect that somehow it was misreporting due to some windows interface.

Well, in any case, good you have it resolved.

The PSU isn't overly hot, no.
I'm posting now because the problem came back today. After a cold boot, the performance dropped to the same levels I saw before, again inexplicably.
Is it possible that the temperature is being mis-reported, maybe because of a bad temp. reading?