laptop slowdown when unplugged

[Trevor Smith]

I find my laptop slooooooooooows down when the power cable is unplugged. 
Simple graphical redraws take sluggish amounts of time. This goes away 
immediately when I plug the power back in. It seems to be 100% reproducible. 
Is it a KDE thing or a linux thing? Is there some configuration item 
somewhere that I can use to prevent the cpu from slowing down or whatever is 
happening?

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com