Comment 14 for bug 107545

I'm also seeing bad interactivity and erratic performance on an Atom-based netbook here. This is especially evident with bursty loads, as caused by the Flash plugin when watching videos, for example.
If I remember correctly, the former default was 80%, and this seems to work a lot better than 95, without being too aggressive the other way around.

Still, going lower than this, to about 50-60%, makes scrolling in Firefox and the simple Metacity minimize animations a lot more smooth -- the frequency ramping doesn't seem to work as well as it should in theory (according to the cpufreq developers, even 100% should work fine if CPU load measurements are exact, which they should be now).

FYI, gnome-power-manager does not modify this setting anymore.