Microsoft’s Raymond Chen (whose epitaph will no doubt include the words, “developer of the original Tweak UI utility for Windows”) put up a fascinating post earlier this week. It’s worth reading for two reasons. First, it details how Microsoft engineers really do use the data you submit when your Windows computer crashes. Second, it highlights a problem that might be affecting you right now:
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.
I’ve done my fair share of overclocking through the years, but currently I’m running every single computer I own (five, at the moment) at its rated speed. It helps that I’m not a gamer – that’s the group that, in my experience, is most fanatical about squeezing performance out of a PC, even at the expense of stability. And most online communities dedicated to hardware tweaks for hardcore gamers spend a lot of time explaining how to overclock to the point where your computer doesn’t crash. You can push it up a notch at a time until it fails, and then back off. Or you can start high, crash, and back down a notch at a time until the crashes stop.
Either way, you’ve created an environment in which some degree of instability is practically guaranteed. If you have mysterious performance problems or compatibility issues, anything short of a blue screen, can you safely say that the hardware isn’t the problem?
Oh, and if I bought a computer from someone who had overclocked it without my knowledge, I would be as mad as hell. That’s fraud, plain and simple. As Raymond says, “There’s a lot of overclocking out there, and it makes Windows look bad.” Unnecessarily, I might add.
Ed Bott 