I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem, and where it's going to get fixed in the future.
Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 has been extremely slow on my laptop, and the cause of it apears to be the Intel Power Management driver. There are no problems with the initial Windows 8 installation. When installing the Windows 8.1 upgrade from the store, the computer restarts and takes hours to complete. After the installation, it takes on the order of 10s of minutes to get to the windows desktop. Opening Task Manager, i see that the CPU is running at 0.2 GHz and won't go higher; the CPU is saturated so the entire system is slow.
The Windows 8.1 upgrade is performed on a clean install of Windows 8 Pro. No third-party software was installed. No Windows Store Apps were installed. (The only update before the upgrade is KB2871389 - the only requirement for the upgrade.)
The same appears to occur on a fresh install of Windows 10. (Installation, boot, and windows are all slow.)
After searching all over online, I found a solution - disable the the service associated with intelppm.sys. There are 2 methods presented:
1. Edit the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\intelppm\Start = 4)
2. Execute "sc config intelppm start= disabled"
They both do the same thing.
After restarting the computer, it works at normal speed. Sometimes an automatic update updates the driver again and the setting needs to be changed again. There appears to be a bug in the Intel Power Management driver introduced some time after Windows 8. Windows 7 works fine even with all the windows updates installed.
For reference, the specs of this computer are:
Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T5500 @ 1.66GHz (MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, Intel 64, NX, VMX)
i945GM Chipset, 82801GHM (ICH7-M/U) Southbridge
I suspect that Windows is doing something SpeedStep that causes this problem. There unfortunately isn't any option in the BIOS to disable SpeedStep.
Thanks for your time.
