Matrix Games Forums

When playing SPWaW on my laptop I usually gets quite annoyed by the fact that the CPU starts running at full speed creating a lot of heat which makes the fans run at high-speed creating a lot of noise (and a lot of heat in my lap). Beside the heat problem the increased CPU-speed reduces battery time to less than one hour on my laptop (a Dell Latitude D610).

Recently I found a software that solved my problem and I would like to recommend it to others that shares the same unpleasant experience when playing this fantastic game on a laptop. It is called SpeedswitchXP and you find it here. From what I can se from the website it only works under XP (but I guess you could find similair programs for other windows versions).

The program lets you choose from four different speed-settings:
- Max performance; runs cpu at full speed all the time
- Battery optimized; runs the cpu at low speed
- Max battery; runs the cpu at low speed (I'm not sure how it differs from the above)
- Dynamic switching; switches the cpu frequency depending on the cpu-load. This is my 'normal' office-mode.

When playing SPWaW I change the setting of SpeedSwitchXP to Max battery which keeps my laptop running at 800MHz instead of it's maximum of 2.0GHz.

I've been using the program for a couple of weeks now and sofar I haven't seen any negative side effects.

Thanks, I was looking for something like this. SPWAW is a ram hog which is why your computer is running hot all the time. Mine does the same using almost 50% of memory. Cheers.