The joys of underclocking

[Dellathane]

It makes no sense. Surely speed is everything. Why did I cut the poor thing's performance by 2/3rds? It's now no better than it's creaking ancestors of yesterdecade. The ones with dial-up that asked you to turn them off when they had finished shutting down.
But I miss those guys. The way they made the same inexplicable noises at startup. How they would groan as they slowly lit their bleary monitors. You could hear them straining to be ready and useful, and how you'd feel bad for waking them up. This is like that.

With a processor at 900MHz everything feels more relaxed. There's less slavish hypertension, as the supercomputer eagerly awaits your next instruction, feeling unsatisfied with your last click of the "back" button. The "slow" PC feels like it's chilling with you, doing it's own things, but still interested.
Ask something demanding of it, and it will go right on and do it. But it is still responsive, still considerate. The overpowered oath, ecstatic at having something to do, will ignore you until it has done everything it can think of. I've had enough of it.

Slow(er-in-theory-but-not-in-practice) is the new beautiful

[Beskar]

Underclocking? That is usually done by underfeeding the CPU which can produce errors due to there simply not being enough power available. However, I do agree that overclocking is a little tiredsome as that is very prone to messing up and becoming unstable due to you over feeding it with energy and it goes hayware, burning out and an array of problems.

"Stock-speed" is the right kind of cool, perhaps the tiniest fraction just above, so it is humming perfectly.

[Dellathane]

I didn't limit the power or anything. I just set the FrontSideBus to 100MHz (as opposed to it's usual 270MHz). Since my CPU's multiplier is 9 that makes a total of 900MHz (and 2.4GHz normally).
I reckon I come across as a little stary eyed in my original post. I think the reason the whole computing experience feels more pleasant at these low speeds is because the system is much quieter. That means you can hear the machine working as you use it, hard dives spinning up, the PSU fan increasing it's speed due to greater power demands; I think it makes me much more patient since I can hear the reason why the computer is slow doing a particular task, and it feels much more mechanical, which is good way to endear yourself to me if you are a machine

[Lemur]

This is good for when Windows Solitaire is just too dang fast.