Overclocking

[needhelp]

Hello,
How is everyone doing? I know I already asked this before, but I haven't gotten an answer that I was hoping for(one that I understood). Here is what I did: I used pxaclocker to overclock LJP to ~500mhz, instead of the normal 200mhz. Now, when I ran LJP, I didn't notice a difference. Let's say after running LJP for a couple of minutes(~10), I exited it and ran speedy. Will I see a difference in speedy? In speedy, it usually says that it's 199mhz, will this increase to ~500mhz? If I don't notice the difference in speedy, where will I notice the difference?
Thanks

P.S. I know people say to start low for overclocking and move up, but I decided to start the other way.

[_Em]

If you overclocked a 200MHz chip to 500MHz (you DO have a PXA chip, yes? If your Palm doesn't have an Intel PXA chip, you won't be able to overclock anything with PXA Clocker), you might end up freezing (or worse, bricking) your device. First: list your device type. Then, use the clocking app that works for your specific device to *slowly* increment the clock and cpu speeds -- start with a sane single-step increase, and try a few things. Keep on doing this, step by step, until your device freezes and needs to be soft reset. Step back to the previous setting; you don't want to go any higher than that, as you could permanently damage it.

[needhelp]

First, thanks a lot for the reply. My device is a palm tungsten E2. It has an Intel Xscale 200mhz processor. I don't know if that's what you mean by a PXA chip. Also, you said " Then, use the clocking app that works for your specific device to *slowly* increment the clock and cpu speeds -- start with a sane single-step increase". Am I gonna be overclocking LJP and running it after every increment to see if it freezes or what I am gonna overclock exactly? And when it does freeze, would that be the max that I can overclock the device?
Thanks

P.S. What do you mean by bricking and what is a good program for defragmentating the palm if there is one?

[Tinnus]

Bricking = making your device useless and damaging it forever.

For defragmenting your best option is a hard reset

BTW, I'm pretty sure 500MHz is far from a safe level in a 200MHz XScale, unless it is heavily underclocked from factory. Start trying 250, 300, then go up in small increments until it hangs/crashes/resets.

[_Em]

The PXA series of CPU chips are what Intel calls the Xscale line. PXA is the part number, and Xscale is the brand. So, you're fine in that department

As far as overclocking, I'd suggest testing against LJP -- although you could test it against anything else you regularly do on your Palm. Just make sure PXA Clocker is set to overclock whatever software it is you're testing.

Using this method, you'll get a regular "freeze" where some jagged lines will show up on the screen, or it might start fading to white. A simple press of the reset button will be enough to get you back up and running again. You now know the max +1 you can overclock your device to. Keep it to less than the settings it locked up at in the future.

As for "bricking", that is the term used when you do something that makes your Palm as useful as, well, a brick. If you try to overclock your Palm too far, the circuitry that the reset button is on will also be overclocked, and the reset button won't work. Generally, you can recover from this by draining your battery and performing a hard reset. This will set the CPU and bus speeds back to their defaults. HOWEVER, sometimes overclocking to extreme levels can actually cause physical damage to your device, blowing some component so that you need it to be physically repaired before it will work again. Needless to say, physical repairs cost about as much as buying a new PDA.

Defragmentation: due to the way the various bits of memory work, the best way to defragment a non-NVFS Palm is to back it up, then perform a hard reset, and restore. You could also just let the battery die and then restore, but that's basicly the same thing. NVFS devices like the T|X, LifeDrive, and Treo 650/680 are a bit more complex, as there are more types of memory to defragment, and different methods for defragmenting the different types.

[pickme]

AH! I previously created a nice little dictionary using the word 'brick' on 1src:

brick: the process by which you're PDA becomes as worthless as a brick
brickhead: the idiot that pays for a program that makes his brick a brick
broke: the result of a brickhead bricking his brick
developer: the bricklayer



P.S. They're serious, I've bricked my Zire 31 several times during an overclock, but since when the battery goes dead it deletes the memory, there weren't really bricks, but not the case with your E2.

[needhelp]

ok, thanks for the help guys.
I'll go slow and take extra percautions.
Thanks again

***If you brick your palm, are there any steps that you can follow to fix the problem?