Do you overclock?

We were talking specifically and only about CPU's.
And no, it's not a system wide change - you can choose what to overclock.
It's not necessary to overclock everything and some things can't be overclocked. Like your hard drive.

Where are these places at that instructs you on how to overclock? A good source of information, if possible. I want to get some performance out of this laptop.

System wide change refers to all that can be OCd and HDDs can be made to perform better when two or more are set up in a RAID config. Single components can be OCd to an extent but to much will affect system balance, system locking is just one effect, but every Overclocker has there own way

I've been in I.T tech support for 12 years & administrated a gaming focussed internet cafe for 7 years of that. I know extremely well what can and can't be done to get a performance gain out of a PC.

Cat, your #1 issue with a laptop will be heat. Most makes and models struggle to keep themselves cool without an overclock and in ambient temperatures.

Please leave the laptop alone or it is almost certainly going to fail due to heat stress and physical warping. Your best bet in regards to laptops is to simply tweak the OS to it's maximum and ensure you are running vista or 7 on it for use with ReadyBoost on a 4gb USB solid state device.

We should take your specific case to private communication - preferrably MSN or IRC so i can talk to you in real time Message me with your preferred contact method please.

Well, the CPU lifespan argument is valid, but when the lifespan of a CPU is measured in decades I don't mind exchanging some years for significantly higher performance in the short term. If done properly there shouldn't be any appreciable damage done beyond normal everyday usage. If done improperly, then it might only live a few weeks. (I'm still amused to think that Anandtech managed to kill two Core i7 chips fairly early on OCing them and applying aggressive stability loads.)

For example, my overclocking kick got started when a friend of the family took my Compaq running a 500MHz AMD CPU and hard modded the board to work with a more powerful 1GHz CPU, the performance increase was nice and I used that machine throughout highschool. The power supply in it had problems even before the mod, but it otherwise ran well enough. That Compaq still works ~12 years later.

Wanting to avoid cheap components I built my replacement, the first computer I self-built was a Pentium 4. I ran a mild ~400Mhz overclock on it for years and that system also still works today. Yet both of these computers are so slow they are a chore to use today beyond surfing, they've outlived their practical usefulness. Hence why I now overclock.

For the moment I'm running my Core i7 920 2.66Ghz @ 4.32Ghz. It's my most aggressive 24/7 overclock so far but I don't compromise stability to run it. I expect to be using this CPU for a very long time to come, and the performance scaling is well worth it. It probably helps that I find it rather fun to overclock them even without the direct benefits factored in, but yeah. High grade components, time & effort, proper cooling and no blatant abuse of the hardware means for the most part, the computer should last well past it's "practical usefulness".

For laptops, I just don't recommend it. Most aren't built to keep components as cool as possible, just as cheaply. And instead of making the priority to be keeping components cool, fans are configured to stay silent first at the sacrifice of cooling performance, only ramping up as a last resort. Heat and voltage are the two main killers for electronic chips and motherboards, and cooking a laptop by overclocking it isn't so hot an idea in my opinion. Laptops rarely last very long, by their nature they (or components in them) break before the owner has bought a new one to replace it.

That's quite a massive boost. Impressive!

I prefer not to over clock since it reduces the lifespan of the hardware in question

Overclocking doesn't really reduce the lifespan of hardware unless you do a rather large OC. I don't worry about shortening the life of my hardware, as it will be obsolete in a few years anyway at most.

Myself and a mate managed to shorten the life of a nVidia GeForce 8600GT, we pushed it a bit to much ... went like hell for a bit

The only clock that I know anything about on computers, is the one in the bottom right hand corner of my screen.