What Causes Clock Speed To Drop Naturally?

I have a laptop that is about 4-5 years old and it has been feeling pretty slow lately. I decided to check the specs because I didnt remember what CPU was in it and was quite surprised to see it read ~894mhz AMD3500+.

Seeing as how I never remembered buying a computer that slow in a long time, I looked up the specs online, and it should be closer to 2.0 ghz. That sounds more reasonable.

So, what causes the clock to slow this much, less than half the speed? I have not done any overclocking / underclocking on the machine.

Is it just simply because it is an older laptop and the processor is old? Even so, I wouldn't expect it to drop that much only being about 4-5 years old.

I'd like to get more life out of this laptop, but I need to find a way to speed it back up. It would be fine if it was back where it used to be when I bought it, but I'm not sure how to do that.

Edit: The clock speed is visible at ~894Mhz both under 'My Computer Properties' and System Information on the processor line.

Computer components don't reduce their clock speed as they become older.

Your system is probably underclocking itself. If you're using windows try adjusting your power settings so that it's set on full performance mode. It might also be a bios setting that's doing it.

A lot of laptops will underclock themselves to save battery power.

If you re-formatted at some point and did not install all of the proper drivers, I have seen laptops remain underclocked regardless of power settings...but E-Oreo pretty much summed it up. It's either driver problems, power settings, or something is completely FUBAR.

I think some CPUs have feature where they will lower the clock speed to save on power when the computer is not heavily in use.

After I read this post I went checking my laptop (since it has been slow for some time now) and found out it is 798MHz. However I checked specifications of the proccessor and found out that minimum they where issued at 1.6GHz.

A friend of mine had an old laptop like yours where his CPU underclocked itself, he was not sure why we had to get install some drivers to get it fixed.