I bought my SONY VAIO FX501 some years ago in Germany.
Since that time, I have been constantly thinking of a possibility
to enable PowerNow! feature on my laptop on Win2K (because of
some reasons). WinXP is a different story. I tried to do that
several times but it never brought any positive result. Until
today. The procedure will be described pretty briefly, I am going
mostly to refer to different sources, where you can find all necessary
information. I can not help mentioning here this
place, which is full of interesting articles and useful advices.
Before I started my last attempt today, my VAIO had R0114K5
bios. I updated it once after buying, as it allowed me to get
rid of many different nasty problems, like sudden restarts and
crashes of my laptop under certain conditions etc. Therefore,
I should say that for me this step (the bios update) was necessary
and eventually very advantageous.
As a first step, I have downloaded powernow_2k.zip,
which was actually PowerNow! ver. 2 (not the latest version, I
must say!). After installation of this stuff, nothing really happened.
The expected new tab "AMD PowerNow!
Technology" did not appear at "Power Options".
I got a new version
of PowerNow! Dashboard from AMD site (It should work for AMD Duron,
according to its documentation, although I would expect that any
other suitable version of Dashboard should work as well). It was
installed smoothly, but the first launch of it simply disappointed
me - it said that "no appropriate PowerNow! software was
installed". Very strange, indeed. I had downloaded some other
versions of aforementioned products and installed them in different
sequences - no results. Finally, I returned to the situation when
the aforementioned things _only_ were installed. As a final step,
I decided to upgrade the bios of my VAIO one more time - to the
latest available (R0121K5)
version for my model.
And what was my surprise when after restart of the computer, Dashboard
started successfully and reported that the clock frequency was
changed automatically. The new tab
was added to "Power Options". Therefore, it really works
on Win2K now. I am sure that the bios upgrade was the key to success.
I have seen many questions in the Internet how to get it working.
People described different situations, but all of them failed.
I hope this short note will be a kind of assistance. However,
please remember - all what I did (the bios upgrade for example),
I did at my own risk, the result was not guarantied. My
laptop could have been easily destroyed (at least to a certain
extent) if the bios update had failed. Ok, I hope I made my point
clear - I am not responsible for any damage
of your laptop in case you decide to repeat the procedure, described
above.
