What does the the “System cooling policy” under “Processor power managment” on Windows 7 do?

Question

On Windows-7 you have the ability set the System cooling policy to passive. What does this actually do?

Answer 1

System Cooling Policy lets you change the cooling mode of your system.

What does this actually do?

Active increases the fan speed before slowing the processor to maintain cooling, while Passive slows down the processor before cooling the fan speed. Passive saves a lot more power as it reduces the clock on your processor, hence giving your more battery time.

Source

Answer 2

For me passive mode makes my computer completely unusable every few minutes. I have an i7 laptop which runs very hot.

This laptop runs so hot that presumably with passive mode enabled it shuts down and runs so slowly (133mHz) that it won't even function.

I like the theory but for some computers it may not have the desired effect and I had to disable it completely (for all power levels).

Try running something like the CPU-Z utility if you want to see what effect its having.