On a freshly installed Dell Latitude D600 with Ubuntu 11.04 (Gnome) and all updates the laptop is running at a low frequency.

At startup the laptop runs at 1.7GHz, but when it's ready to use it's stuck at 600 MHz.

The governor used is ondemand. If I change this nothing happens and after a restart it is back with ondemand.

When I run
cpufreq-set -g ondemand -u 1700000
I get no error but, but nothing happens.

Output from cpufreq-info:

eva@eva-Latitude-D600:~$ cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 007: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009
Report errors and bugs to cpufreq@vger.kernel.org, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: acpi-cpufreq
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
hardware limits: 600 MHz - 1.70 GHz
available frequency steps: 1.70 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 1000 MHz, 800 MHz, 600 MHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 600 MHz and 600 MHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 600 MHz.
cpufreq stats: 1.70 GHz:1.21%, 1.40 GHz:0.00%, 1.20 GHz:0.00%, 1000 MHz:0.00%, 800 MHz:0.00%, 600 MHz:98.79% (1)
Running at 600Mhz the laptop is just to slow to use even for my mother (who is the owner who complained of a slow 10.10, which I tried to upgrade to 11.04 but failed and then did a clean install).

Disabling Speedstep in Bios is not an option since doing that sets the CPU speed at 600 MHz to "protect" the computer.

What can I do to get the CPU frequency control work in Ubuntu and avoid installing ******* for her again?