Introduction

That day I spent the whole evening testing mild overclock of HT ref clock by 10%. Nothing strange happened at that time, so I assumed everything was stable and so I was going to leave OC settings at this level. Anyway, it’s nice to have it a little bit faster than it was planned by manufacturer, right? The next day I went to ACDSee to browse previously taken photos. Nothing special here, but strangely enough, Windows 7 went to BSOD while creating thumbnails.

Consequences

After restart I immediately put back the clock speed and booted Windows. I found out that ACDSee’s database had crashed to an unrecoverable state. I tried reinstalling, but it didn’t help. Then I just went to that folder and wiped everything from the hard drive. Luckily, it did help to recover ACDSee. But there was another problem, which I found even later on. Never happened to me before, but after this OC failure Skype tray icon just died and wouldn’t show anymore. While Skype continued to run in background, I had a hard time finding it when it was necessary, so I just ran a reinstall, which helped.

Conclusion

Don’t push too hard with OC, especially if your processor is not black, meaning not supposed to overclock. Doing so could lead to unexpected results, sometimes even worse that simple BSOD or POST. Be extremely careful experimenting under Windows 7 RC. I really hope RTM will show better stability on this front.