[Gllug] BIOS setting of clock speed

[t.clarke]

I don't know whether anyone else has come across this oddity, or posted on the
subject before, so I thought I'd mention it in case:-

I have had a couple of instances of PCs playing up (running Windoze as it
happens !); in once case Windows would not install on a new PC and in the
other case the PC which had been running fine for ages suddenly starting
misbehaving.

In both cases the problem turned out to be the BIOS setting the processor
speed too slow. In the first case, on install on a new machine, the BIOS
actually warned that the higher (correct !) speed might cuase unstable operation
or somesuch; so the defaulted lower speed was initially accepted.  Changing
to the higher speed solved the problem.  In the second case it appears that the
the clock speed somehow flipped down on its own accord.  Resetting it to the
higher speed solved the problem.

I ran memtest86 on the second occasion before and after changing the clock speed
back up.  A number of errors were noted at the lower speed, but none at the
higher speed.

I can only assume that at the lower speed (with, as I recall, a correspondingly
lower FSB speed) the memory cells are refreshed at a slower rate and
occasionally some of them 'lose' their contents.  Of course, it maybe due to
something entirely different !  However,  it does appear that 'underclocking'
can be just as dangerous as 'overclocking' !!   Strangely, this appears to be
at odds with the documentation which suggests that running a cpu slower
is the 'safe' option.


Tim

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