Laptop Question

the actual reason you were seeing speeds of 3.2ghz last year and now you see 2.2 is that the processors intel is using in general have changed. the 3.2ghz chips are regular pentium 4s, and the 2.2ghz chips are the pentium-m "centrino" chips. the pentium-m is a lot more power efficient and is more like the athlon 64 performance-wise. a 2.2ghz pentium-m performs much like a 3-ghz p4 (unless you're doing encoding, that is-- a p4 will nearly always win with raw power tests).

the new lower-ghz processors aren't necessarily "much more powerful," heck, they're about the same or maybe slightly more powerful, but per-watt performance is much better and the performance at the same clock speed would be quite a lot better due to efficiency.

Jam it back in, in the dark.