Low performance when charger is plugged in

Question

I got this laptop: Dell Inspiron N5010 with i5 2,40GHz processor, 8GB Memory and a Kingston SSD.

4 months ago my charger`s pin jack has broken, but it was still working. I noticed that the performance had decreased drastically when the charger was plugged in, so i bought a new charger, and all was working fine.

Last week my laptop was very laggy so i decided to reinstall Windows 8. After a clean installation, the same problems occurs with the charger.

When the charger is plugged in ( even if the battery is inside or outside ) the performance if very low. When i remove the charger and start the laptop with the battery the laptop works perfect.

The power options are set to High Performance in both cases.

So what should be the problem ?

Solution

After reading a lot of documentation over the Internet, I found out how to fix this after I read this Superuser thread:

How do I stop laptop from underclocking?

I disabled the SpeedStep option in the BIOS and now my laptop works fine.

Comments

[ganesh]

Many Dell laptops check to see if you use a Dell charger. If they cannot detect this (e.g. because a pin has broken) they go to a minimum performance mode. This is well known and documented. Nice to know that disabling speedstep negates that.

[Tara]

No, i have same problem with lenovo g580 simple i bought new charger and it works perfect if you cant purchane new charger you should repair it otherwise issue will remain the same