So I got a new ultrabook recently, a Lenovo Thinkpad T470. It is a great ultrabook, except the fact that Windows 10 is preinstalled with most resellers. Since I do need unix for fast webdevelopment and easy use of docker I uninstalled that right away and installed Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 – sadly the fingerprint sensor is not supported yet (seriously Lenovo?) – but other then that the machine works, when the charger is plugged in at least…
Slow computation
I noticed the slow working the first time I wanted to open firefox and browse to find info about the fingerprint sensor. The execution took forever and the pages seemed to be laggy. Wooohhhh I just got a ~2000€ laptop, this should not be the case!
After a while I firgured out it was the CPU only running on 400MhZ – ALL THE TIME (on battery) – there was no dynamic switching between clock ratio what-so-ever.
Finding the cause
After a while spending with google I found out that it could been the BIOS Version. So hitting enter when Boot and looked into the current Version 1.3.2 it is – 1.4.2 was the newest at the time.
So I grabbed my USB Stick and flashed the Bios to the newest version (BIOS here). Et voila – cpu seems to work just fine. Overall this took me some time – annoying since you expect the hardware to be working out of the box. „Normal“ users would have been in real trouble here – probably a reason why Lenovo ships it only with Windows 10 – I could not replicate the issue there, but I guess and hope it is not an issue for Windows users.
Hope this helps someone and saves some time.