Slow Breezy on HP nx6125 (still struggling)

[Tatome at web.de]

Hi,
when I found out, I had to add
    noapic nolapic
to the kernel command line to get my HP nx6125 laptop working, I thought 
I had solved my problems. At second glance though things are not as 
pretty as they seem.
First, I have to run
    cpufreq-selector -g performance
everytime I start my laptop. Just putting that line into
    /etc/init.d/powerfreq
won't do; for some reason
    cat /var/cpuinfo
will still tell me the cpu is running at less than half the speed it 
should. Supposedly "performance" is the default for cpufreq, but on 
startup it's clearly not set.
Second problem (wrong: challenge :o) ) is that regardless of kernel 
options and cpufreq governor X will pause at first startup for a long 
time before actually starting Gnome. I first thought maybe there's some 
module that needs to load, but a diff between lsmod before and after the 
first startup shows only fglrx preloading which doesn't help. After the 
first successful start x will pop up like a charm. Maybe I didn't look 
in the right places but I didn't find any warnings or errors that might 
be related to this.
Would anyone know by any chance how I could resolve any of those issues?
Thanks,
Johannes

PS: Someone asked me in reply to an earlier post if it was really a 
Sempron in my nx6125. I know it says on the HP website this model comes 
with an Opteron, but my BIOS tells me differently and /proc/cpuinfo 
does, too.
I was also told I might wanna switch to a 64bit Kernel. I tried that but 
all I get is an error message saying my processor doesn't support long 
word arithmetic or something similar.