LOW CPU usage. 20% maxes out (Not Throttled)

I seem to have the opposite issues of a lot of people. . .


My stuff frequently crawls. It seems that my CPU maxes out at around 20%
I am having an issue mostly with firefox since that is what I use, but other things don't seem to go over either.

I can be stalled out. I can be sitting there with the system saying not responding, then after a few minutes of 16% (~20% overall) it unfreezes.

Going to Details in the task manager, and right clicking on it:
Affinity is set for all processes.

I have changed the system to high performance with the minimum CPU at 100% so my 2.4 GHz CPU ends up constantly running at 3.27-3.31GHz

5-20% cpu usage at 3.3 GHz is a lot better than 5-20% at 1GHz, but it seems like a waste of 80% of the cycles, and still hangs a lot. I would like to be able to save battery and lower the temperature by letting it run at 80% of 1GHz if it wants.

High Performance and changing the task to High Priority (resets with each start) has helped, but is there a way to get something better, and more performance than maxing out at 20%.