I was wrestling with an interesting challenge this week. I guess this is my month to wrestle with overheating laptops, eh? (see “The Case of the Overheating Laptop”. I should probably update that one…). Last time it was a hardware issue. This time? Ultimately, I chased it down to being a driver issue.
A clean install of good ol’ Windows XP SP3 on an AMD 64 Mobile Athlon 3000+ based laptop. It ran well, but I noticed more fan noise than expected which, as we all know, means the CPU is running warm.
I popped over to Microsoft Update and noticed it had an AMD Processor driver listed. I grabbed that and rebooted. No difference, still running about 10 – 15 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the reload. Not cool (literally!).
I did some digging around, but only found old articles about the lack of AMD K7 support before Service Pack 1 (like this technet article).
Since the searching wasn’t getting me anywhere, I started poking around the AMD site directly. Eventually I happened upon the PowerNow! Dashboard application. Nifty little application that quickly confirmed that the CPU was never slowing down. It was stuck at full throttle! This easily explained the heat issue. Poor thing never throttled back.
I looked closer at that CPU driver I had installed earlier. AMDppm.sys. Hmm… I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I was after (in fact, later I saw reference that it is only for Phenoms?).
More poking around at the AMD site turned up the AMDk8.sys driver. I grabbed that, installed it, rebooted and suddenly had a much cooler laptop.
I don’t know how and I don’t know why. But I’m pretty sure Microsoft Update handed me the wrong driver. Fortunately, that challenge has now been solved by getting the proper one from AMD.
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April 23rd, 2009 
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That wouldn’t surprise me…I’ve never had luck with drivers from Windows Update. They’re either the wrong one, or massively outdated, or just don’t work.