But fear not, I got N2003 running perfectly on mine with just a little work and because my laptop suffers from overheating issues I also managed to make my machine more stable for everyday use.

Note: I am not responsible for any damage done to you or your machine after following (or even trying to follow) these instructions.

1. Buy an external soundcard. I went for an External USB Creative Soundblaster Live! Model Number: S80490. After installation you can disable your onboard card by going to Start, Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager. Click the + next to “Sound, video and game controllers”, right-click on your onboard sound device and then select “disable”.

2. Ensure Speedstep is enabled in the BIOS (it should be by default).

3. Download Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) from pbus-167.com and install it.

4. Setup each tab of the program to look like mine does in the screenshots below.

You may ask why would a 2.4GHz system run better at 1.2GHz? Well, good question. Have you ever been playing a game or running a simulation on your computer and suddenly it’s like your system is struggling to cope? Have you ever been racing along and then suddenly seem to be running in slow motion (even though you have a high framerate)? The reason is that your system is either getting too hot or the system doesn’t think the CPU speed is required anymore, so your gaming machine suddenly might switch from running the game/sim at 2.4GHz to running it at 330MHz. With NASCAR 2003 CPU clock switching can be catastrophic, the simulation will not continue to run in a way that you will be able to race and although I have experienced “slow motion” in many types of games while using the XPS Gen 2, it really hurts most with racing games/sims. The thing also is that general use of the computer seems better for me at a constant 1.2GHz, almost like the system knows where it’s at. Firefox opens Web pages faster and Windows Explorer opens files, folders noticably quicker than it did previously.

I had a similar problem before with Grand Prix Legends, so I looked up some of the fixes and this utility appeared to solve my problems for me.

It is so very, very annoying that Windows XP manages your power saving without giving you any idea of what it is actually doing. It has taken me months to find out what this issue is and it’s only thanks to it happening with work that I found out.

Of course for the huge majority of the time I will have the SpeedswitchXP Utility on “dynamic switching” the same as Windows XP had it, but now every time I start to do something where I know I need the power and XP wouldn’t, I’m going to crank it up!