What is the 'clock speed' of a processor, and how can it be changed?

Question

Apparently changing this can make my computer run faster??

I have an Intel Celeron M processor which is running at 1.3GHZ.

Answer 1

You can make your computer run faster by "clocking" the processor. This is done in the BIOS. Your present clock speed is1.3GHZ

The best thing you can do is google for people who have done it before and get step by step instructions.

Beware that if you get something wrong you could end up with a fried processor at the worst or computer not working at the least.

Answer 2

Clock speed is the amount of operations your computer does every second, in this case, 1.3 GHZ is 1,300,000,000 operations every second. Clock speed when used to measure how fast a CPU is is pretty misleading though, as different processors are able to do different amounts of operations every second, for example there were Pentium 4s with 2 to 3 times the clockspeed or your Intel Celeron M, but yours would be at least comperable in overall speed.

Anyway, while there's a good chance that you can go into your computer's BIOS options and change this (there are various keys one can press at startup to enter into these menus, they are displayed for short ammount of times, usually it's something along the lines of insert, escape, F11, or F12) I would -HIGHLY- recommend against doing this, especially on a laptop.

The reasons for this, is clockspeed directly affects how much power your computer uses, and how much heat it puts out. So, if you set your clockspeed above what it is supposed to be, and don't have any kind of special cooling system like water cooling (which is unlikely on a laptop), there is a good chance your processor could overheat, destroying it. Even if all did go well, and you managed to keep it from overheating, your battery life would be significantly decreased.

Answer 3

The clock speed is essentially the speed of the processor - in the case of your chip - 1.3 Ghz.

Although chips are labelled by frequency per second, there is a one to one relation to how many cycles (lowest units of execution) take place within this second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed

Generally, it takes 2 clock cycles to execute a simple machine code instruction. More complex machine code instructions take longer.

Machine code is the basic language computers understand. High level languages are converted into this form either by compilation or interpretation.

You can change the clock speed on some processors but this means the chip works harder (and thus gets hotter) so you would probably need to add better cooling.

If the cooling isn't sufficient, you risk reducing the lifetime of the chip. If the cooling isn't sufficient at all, the machine may fail to start the operating system.

Answer 4

Read more here about clock speed or clock rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_speed

The clock rate can usually be adjusted thru software or thru the BIOS. This is easier done on enthusiast motherboards for desktops but could be difficult or impossible in a laptop. It looks like you are trying to overclock your Celeron M on a laptop. I don't think you will find anything in the BIOS that will allow adjustment of the front side bus.

Answer 5

IMPORTANT!
Do not change it if you don't know what you are doing, It WILL destroy the processor if you go to far. Go to the BIOS (the first screen when you turn on your computer, press del, f10, or f7 depending on your computer)
I strongly suggest that you don't try unless you have a very very old computer you are about to throw away.
My experience, the speed difference is not that noticeable.

There are people who do it (overclock a lot), but you need to buy/make VERY good heatsinks (the fan on top of the processor who cools the processor) or some weird stuff (people make air condition, connect their computer to a freezer, or use liq nitrogen to cool it down (don't try, for very very very experience user who don't mind killing their computers)

Answer 6

Clock speed is the speed of your processor.Clock speed can't be increased till you overclock your processor. By overclocking, it means to run for eg., run a 2.4 GHz processor at like 2.8 GHz. As you are asking about a laptop, i would recommend not to overclock your processor as it could be damaged.

Answer 7

You can change it, Through the system BIOS. Although you shouldnt mess with it if you do not know what you're doing