> It turns out that Dell hard-coded the firmware to throttle the CPU when a lower-than-expected wattage power brick was used. My laptop throttles the CPU to 80

> It turns out that Dell hard-coded the firmware to throttle the CPU when a lower-than-expected wattage power brick was used. My laptop throttles the CPU to 800MHz when it thinks it detects a power brick that doesn't have the correct sense wire. Or, more commonly, when the power brick is not all the way plugged in (even if it is working fine).