I can't see the reason for speedstep. The idea that the CPU should figure out what the user needs is, frankly, moronic thinking my (un)Intel. So why don't they just have up/down button for CPU speed, like they have for the speakers? Too intuitive, obviously, for Intel to deduce.

I wish that thinkpads had 4 of these buttons, not just 3. We could reprogram them as follows :

sound up - increase sound
sound down - decrease sound
sound up + down - must / un-mute

mute - CPU speed up
4th button - CPU speed down
mute + 4th button = cpu to minimum speed ('mute' the cpu speed)

What do you think of this?

I love automatic CPU throttling and don't think it's moronic at all. Anyone that makes a decent CPU does this. I also like it to be seamless and automatic, especially so for the general public who wants something that just works. No manual switches for me that requires drivers, could be broken and forces me to remember and worry about fan speeds. I'm a set and forget type of guy. Only thing I like fine tuning is LCD brightness.

The sound is affected by the fan speed which in turn affect the temps which in turn is affected by environment, case cooling, CPU type, component temps, etc. I prefer to systems that provides sufficient cooling and at the same time be quite. This is my preference for all my laptops and OCed desktops.

For our Thinkpads, there exists a tool call Thinkpad Fan Control.

Automatic speed control is mainly a power-saving measure. It allows the CPU to run at its minimum speed when idle or lightly loaded, preserving battery life, spring into full speed as needed, then return to minimum speed when the task is done. It also helps lower system temperatures, maybe even enough to turn off the fan, lowering power consumption even further.

Complete manual control over the clock speed can have undesirable consequences, such as the laptop eating through your battery charge just because you forgot that you kept the speed at maximum when you're just typing a document. Temperatures will be higher too.

A compromise could be made: keep Speedstep, but have the ability to manually set the max speed. You don't even need new buttons-- you can use the Windows key + the volume up/down buttons to set the max speed. With a little programming, this could be done.