Comment 19 for bug 637845

I have been experiencing something with very similar symptoms to this on a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop with Ubuntu 12.04. Looking in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq showed that the CPU frequencies were always stuck at just under half what they could do, no matter the load. After finding this ticket I installed cpufrequtils, to get more readable output, with the immediate result that the CPU frequencies started behaving sensibly! I presume that init scripts which come with that package, including the one to load relevant CPU frequency-related kernel modules have something to do with it, but I am somewhat surprised, given the impressive effect that installing the package had, that it isn't installed by default. Does anyone else know something here that I don't?