Overclocking Makes Windows Look Bad


Recommended Posts

Interesting post from Raymond Chen's blog about surreptitious overclocking and the (in)stability of Windows. Chen's on the Windows dev team at MS.

A bunch of us were going through some Windows crashes that people sent in by clicking the "Send Error Report" button in the crash dialog. And there were huge numbers of them that made no sense whatsoever. [...]

He sent email to some Intel people he knew to see if they could think of anything. They said that the only thing they could think of was that perhaps somebody had mis-paired RAM on their motherboard, but their description of what sorts of things go wrong when you mis-pair didn't match this scenario.

Since the failure rate for this particular error was comparatively high (certainly higher than the one or two I was getting for the failures I was looking at), he requested that the next ten people to encounter this error be given the opportunity to leave their email address and telephone number so that he could call them and ask follow-up questions. Some time later, he got word that ten people took him up on this offer, and he sent each of them e-mail asking them various questions about their hardware configurations, including whether they were overclocking.

Five people responded saying, "Oh, yes, I'm overclocking. Is that a problem?"

The other half said, "What's overclocking?" He called them and walked them through some configuration information and was able to conclude that they were indeed all overclocked. But these people were not overclocking on purpose. The computer was already overclocked when they bought it. These "stealth overclocked" computers came from small, independent "Bob's Computer Store"-type shops, not from one of the major computer manufacturers or retailers.

For both groups, he suggested that they stop overclocking or at least not overclock as aggressively. And in all cases, the people reported that their computer that used to crash regularly now runs smoothly.

Moral of the story: There's a lot of overclocking out there, and it makes Windows look bad.

Edited by jcl
Link to post
Share on other sites
  • 2 years later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...