Yup, i think what you actually wanted was to run a search on "powertop" and join this thread.

Edit: That's not the thread i was remembering. T.M.O search fails again.

What I'd be more interested in is to stop the CPU from scaling down to 500 then 250Mhz. I want it run at 600 all the time.

Yeah I think all the negative responses are because stability and power conservation are bigger issues right now, whereas there's more than enough performance for anything mildly sane you might want to do with an N900...that said, if you want to risk your unit, it looks like 800Mhz would be quite safe for the CPU since other devices with the same hardware are running this clock speed right out of the box. The only issue is if it might cause a problem with other hardware - these devices weren't made to take different hardware so you never know. I'd try increments of 10Mhz or so until you reach 800 stable if you want to go through with this - remember there may be no way to reset the clock speed. You can't reflash if it doesn't boot because the clock speed is too high.

Overclock with a low battery - this will make it glitch out more easily. That way when you plug it into an AC power source and the voltage increases a bit, it should make the CPU a little more stable (this is how it works in PC overclocking anyways) and give you a chance to reset the clock.

Edit: BTW disabling the CPU clock scaling is a very bad idea! You'd probably see zero performance increase, and it would eat through your battery like crazy and probably heat up the unit a bit. The CPU's clock speed will increase with demand. This is a good thing. No need to have it running at max speed all the time.

probably get a 3hr battery life with that setting !

Who cares? Is the current 4 better?

Sorry, i saw a really interesting discussion of people using different powertop features but after 10 minutes with power search, i still can't find it. Maybe someone who was participating in it will speak up. Maybe it wasn't powertop they were discussing. Maybe i'm completely off my rocker?

BTW, have you met our resident troll? He couldn't get enough attention in the iPhone forum, so he's now living under our bridge.

Christmas may be over, but ClockworkOrangeBox has donned his gay apparel and come to TMO to troll the ancient yet once again...

CPU itself has really only some effect on the total use-time. Display eats most of the power, cellmo is eating a lot with network traffic. Having higher speeds usually allows cpu to go back to idle sooner, so, indeed, it might even prolong the battery life if you overclock the CPU. Having said that, I don't especially suggest anybody to do it. I can only say that I have seen it running at 650, so within the suggested 10%.

Screw it. Someone wants to make an overclocking app, I'll test it. It's not like I paid anything for the phone, anyway. And if it gets bricked, I can afford a new one, and I'll have spare parts for it.

Not really, I've been monitoring and mine averages 60-70% at 600. I notice a lot of slowdowns and brief non-responsiveness while the CPU is pegged. Why? It 'appears' random, but haven't had the time or energy to mess with finding out.

I don't have a ton installed, a few active widgets and occasionally throw on something from devels. IOW, your usage != others' usage. Mine doesn't sit idle much (unless I'm in the middle of my nightly 3-5 hour nap).

What could possibly go wrong? That's easy, not much else. The question really should be, "what could possibly be more wrong?" As it sits, this thing may as well be a year old looking for a replacement anyway. Seriously. Well, one thing I can say (at least), it has been fairly stable so overclocking may happily take care of that.

I'm always skeptical of overclocking the CPU. A faster CPU alone (esp. small increases) rarely ever means a huge or even noticeable increase in performance. If designed for the 1GHz, then we /should/ notice something, but not knowing much more than superficial, the bus and a device's thermal dynamics will be what struggles. I'm game and have overclocked most anything I can, but lockups tend to increase, reliability drops, heat goes out of bounds causing these issues and longer-term durability problems so the marginal, if any, improvement tends not to be worth it.

I also overclocked my G1, but I couldn't live with the effects - went from rock solid and reliable (assuming I watched memory) to locking up frequently and I (personally) didn't notice any improvement.

BUT, this is Maemo AND the N900 (which I will likely set aside fulltime rather than just using my backup for BT in a couple months for some of the hardware we see in the pipeline) so the biggest question is why the heck not try? People install sketchy apps from devels and muck around with Linux they don't understand and brick the thing all the time anyway. What's the big deal?