Andrew Scagnelli's questions

I have an old laptop I'd like to repurpose as a print/SSH server (among a few other light tasks). The laptop has a 2.0GHz Pentium M processor with 1GB of RAM (to be specific, its an old Dell Precision M60). The system is running Ubuntu Server 10.04. A combination of htop and my screen config show that the CPU is constantly running at its full speed, even when under little/no load -- this was not an issue under 9.04 and 9.10. I'd like to drop the speed of the processor down to save on power, heat, and noise.

Is there any way that I can force the system to only run at 600MHz.

When trying to choose a SATA magnetic hard drive (not SSD) for high performance for both random and linear access, which should be the primary factor?

For example: would a 10k RPM drive with 16MB of cache perform better than a 7200RPM drive with 32MB of cache