How do I slow down my Windows PC?

March 25, 2004 1:30 PM

Is there software available for Micorosft Windows that slows CPU cycles, emulating a slower machine? For example, if I wanted to test software on a Pentium II 200, emulated on a faster machine.
posted by the fire you left me to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Here's a geocities link with a few links for apps to slow down your CPU. I've only wanted to slow down my CPU so I could play my classic PC games( LLL, SQ, SSI AD&D, etc. etc. ). These links seem to have the same purpose in mind.
posted by mnology at 2:15 PM on March 25, 2004

Note that while slowing down is pretty easy, going to a level of "I want this machine to be precisely the same speed as [machine of choice]" is a lot trickier, as operation x might be 2.413 times slower than your machine while operation y might be 5.284 times slower. And then there's pipelining, memory access, caching patterns, etc.
posted by fvw at 2:33 PM on March 25, 2004

Widely regarded as the best option is MoSlo. Even then, you probably won't get quite the fine-grained control you are hoping for.
posted by majick at 5:15 PM on March 25, 2004

Software-wise I think your best is probably MoSlo. Hardware-wise you may want to consider underclocking your computer. Most of the changes in recent processor releases have been little more than clock speed bumps and cache increases. Turn off your L2 cache and reduce your multiplier and voila you're 3 years into the past.
posted by yangwar at 6:33 AM on March 26, 2004

I use VMWare when I need a slow computer to test on. It's an emulator, but the emulated machine(s) tend to be slow, and you can limit them further with reduced memory etc.

More importantly, I can work with it without messing up the configuration of my real computer.
posted by mmoncur at 11:05 PM on March 26, 2004