I have an HP Athlon notebook that’s rated at 1.86 GHz with 448 MB of RAM (running XP Home). However, it doesn’t seem to think so. The first time after a reboot, if I go into My Computer and pick properties, it’ll tell me it’s a 519 Mhz machine with 329 MB of RAM (no matter how long after startup I do this). If I force it to do this again, it gives me the right info. Why would the computer be giving me false info on the first read? It doesn’t appear to really be causing problems, although Halo flashed me a warning that my computer wasn’t fast enough (minimum req: 600 Mhz). It still runs, but I just get the sneaking suspicion I’m not getting the performance I should be.
Hmm… Windows is notorious in not being able to extract the proper information from mobile chips. The RAM thing is a bit puzzling though. Try a 3rd party app that doesn’t use the built in windows routines. WCPUID is the industry standard IIRC.
When you boot the machine up, is it plugged in or running off of battery power? - Some mobile chips will automatically downclock themselves when running off of the battery to reduce power consumption.
AMD’s mobile processors have PowerNow! technology that lowers and raises the operating frequency automagically when running on battery power depending on how much is needed. That doesn’t account for the missing RAM, which might be installed incorrectly (check if your BIOS agrees).
Just realized this topic is over 17 years old 
So why would it be on my recent unread list ?
Anyway now I’ve started I’ll finish 
A small program called “Speccy” will give you all the information about what’s under the hood of your computer:- https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy
Just FYI, another option is SiSoftware Sandra. I’ve only ever used the free version, and it’s very functional and very useful. It’s been around for quite a while and seems to be kept updated.
Since this was resurrected, I’ll go ahead and guess what the issue was.
Mobile CPUs were the first to have lower power states. I suspect this isn’t playing well with the way XP would check the CPU speed. It was sampling it at a time when it was running in a lower power state. Upon restarting, the system was active enough that it was running at full speed.
As for the RAM, both of those numbers are kinda odd. Neither are a power of two or a multiple thereof. So I suspect both are actually describing the available RAM, and the computer actually had 512MB. Likely the first is the amount of available RAM at boot (as 64MB could be reserved for the GPU) and the second was the amount available after some programs were loaded.
I also suspect that Halo checked the current CPU speed, and not the max speed. Though perhaps it was relying on XP’s bad processor info.
I assume this zombie was resurrected by a spammer. Mods: is there really no way to put the zombie back in its grave once the spam post is removed so that it doesn’t show up as a current post?
Spammer probably resurrected it and got cornfielded (along with their “contribution”). But the forum software has no way of putting the zombie back into the grave.