Looks like you guys were right. I disabled speedstep and could go a full race but at <30 fps. Then I re-enabled speedstep, elevated the laptop and placed a room fan next to it and was back at >45 fps and a full race. Thanks.
I'm running patch U on a Dell 600m laptop. I've attached the dxdiag output. Basically, I'm running the default LFS config and the following hardware/software:
Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A17
1280MB RAM
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz
MOBILITY RADEON 9000 64 mb @ 1400 x 1050 (32 bit) (60Hz)
ati2dvag.dll 6.14.0010.6587 (English)
The problem that I'm having is that the game runs fine for about 5 minutes, then CPU utilization hits 100% and the game gets choppy and intermittently responsive. I can exit the game gracefully and relaunch lfs.exe only to again have about 5 minutes of play before it gets choppy again. I had the same problem with a prior patch as well (P). I'm gonna try rolling back to older versions to see if I still have the same problem, but I thought I'd ask in case anybody else has seen this.