Overclocking: Stupid me

Alright, here's the deal. I was playing around with some overclocking utilities tonight. *first time* And I was surfing around on the forums for Futuremark, the makers of 3dmark benchmark, well one of the threads in there mentioned modifies driver's so I went through to check them out. After installing one of them and rebooting my system I came up with an error message stating that validation failed for both "VSinit.DLL" and "VSData.DLL". It also said that I might be missing a root certificate. I know this isn't exactly a security question but im hoping yall might be able to help.

Hi,

I don't know what you have done to cause that, as I cannot see a direct link between overclocking and your firewall.

Those two files belong to ZoneAlarm, try uninstalling and re-installing it.

:)

More than likely you need the MS root certificate update. Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com (once you undo the horribleness you've done) and update your host. This will solve that issue.

The validation message is Windows telling you that you're trying to use DLL files that are not digitally signed by MS and therefore may cause your system to become unstable. This is a protection mechanism to protect you from doing something stupid. There are ways around validation but based on your post, I wouldn't attempt to circumvent it.

As for overclocking with DLL files, baaad idea. Certain hardware platforms don't yeild a significant increase in performance after overclocking. I would research the performance stats on your processor before hand.

Also, when you overclock, you increase heat. If you have marginal cooling capabilites, you're going to have a ton of issues.

If that isn't enough, you have to *tune* when you overclock. In other words, ramp your processor up to a point where it fails then slowly ratchet back until it's stable. Again, this may end up being just a hair better performance than you have already based on the processor you have.

And finally, if you're not sure what you're doing, it's best left undone until you find a test host that you can play with.

--TH13

Alright what I think the deal was, was my system was stressed out and overheating all around. It ended up shutting my browsers down. *I think a certain type of packet just wasnt being sorted because I could connect certain programs, but not Firefox or IE*

I was worried it was a virus but i did a scan with AVG Free, Spybot, and Adaware all with the newest updates. But anyway I shut the system down last night and booted it back up this morning, ran a checkdisk on it before I had windows load up. When it boots up it boots completely normally, no error messages for ZA .dll's or anything.

I want to apologies for the completely uninformative post last night, I was tired heh. Basicaly what happend was I wasnt completely sure if my cooling was adaquate to up my CPU speed a little. I'm still using the stock cooler from AMD and aparently that wasn't enough. When I went into the bios and set the CPU speeds to manual I upped my memory clock from 133mhz to 140mhz, hit f10 and waited for it to reboot. It would post, and show my cpu speed on the bios screen but not go any further. I shut the computer down, unplugged it, poped the battery to reset my bios, briefly went in to set my bios back to normal settings and then tried to restart. Then thats when I started to have problems with the .dll's and my browsers. I ran the virus checks and anti-malware, I found some malware but I dont think it was anything serious. Shut the computer down and after rebooting today it's all back to normal.

Luckily I dont think I ruined anything in my computer, everything seems to be operating normaly and I'll probably run a benchmark to see if anything is sluggish *I wouldnt be suprised*. The reason I type this entire thing out is because there is a possibility I'm wrong and it is something software related. So if you can think of anything that would be a great help.

Oh yeah, NEVER AGAIN!!

OK,

I guess this one belongs in hardware so I shall move it.


thehorse13 has given some good advice, messing with .dlls and the like is asking for trouble.

Yes, any "stock" heatsink and fan is only designed to be used with the processor at its "stock" settings. If you want to overclock you have to compensate.

That means:

1. Heatsink
2. CPU fan
3. Case fans
4. Exhaust fans
5. Thermal paste (Arctic Silver or similar, or some of the newer products) not the stock "white gunk"

And in extreme situations liquid cooling or a Peltier

Please do a bit of research first, and don't do it on your main production box :eek:

http://www.overclockers.com is a nice site to hang out in.

This is a P4 2.26, but I had it running stable at 3.066 :firedevil when I deliberately built it to crack the 3.0Ghz barrier.

:D

Awesome, yeah I know that I need a better cooler, I was just hoping I could push alittle extra out for a small boost in performance, oh well.

I figured out what the problem with the .ddl's were, I had to reset my bios in order to boot the computer and when I boot it up because of that my windows clock is off, *stock 2002 jan 1st* and those .dll's were saying "what the hell, that is NOT right."