This article originally started when I was actively involved in PowerShell development. Now I am mostly updating it on request of my blog readers (people like you). After a few dozen updates over the course of many years, it is now regarded as one of the top resources in the Powershell community.

I'm a keen fan of Mozilla Firefox web browser and was very excited when a new version came out. Having installed that on my Vista work PC and found a real speed boost, I rushed to upgrade it at home... only to find it hangs at startup on Windows 7.

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.

First, I’m not a big overclocker. Second, I’m not going to use any TEC coolers for ultra fast performance. Third, I don’t have a canister of liquid nitrogen. So, nothing fancy, just air, common non-black processor and a little customized case are going to be involved. If you think it’s pathetic, just don’t read lines below. But if you value your money and want something for cheap, keep reading.

Our company finally bought a powerful HP DL380 G6 server with 2 x Xeon 5540 (8 cores total). Prior to production, we put 2 x 4 gig memory sticks (8 GB of memory) and 3 SCSI hard drives to make RAID5. As you can imagine, initial testing of this box was up to me.