The first thing to say about overclocking is that there really is no 100 per cent safe way to overclock a PC component.

There's a reason commercial products have a set rating – manufacturers cannot guarantee that the product will work accurately if set at a higher frequency.

A good percentage of components, though, are set to run slightly lower than they can actually achieve. That means you should be able to squeeze a little more performance out of just about anything.

But don't expect to get an extra 1GHz out of a processor just because you've read that someone did it online. Every bit of silicon is different.

If you've never heard of overclocking before, it's a technique that computer enthusiasts use to increase the speed of the various components in their machine. If you know much about vehicles, you could think of the clock speed of a given processor as the equivalent of a car manufacturer's built in speed restrictor.

Unleash the speed

Thankfully, there are ways to overclock that minimise the risk to your hardware. The chief ones are to be careful and patient. You can't simply crank up the clock speed of a processor or graphics card by a crazy amount and then expect it to work first time. It's a slow process that will generally only increase the component's performance by a relatively small amount.

So why does anyone do it at all then? Well, the origins of overclocking came from a time when computer hardware was prohibitively expensive, so upgrading your PC every year to keep up with advances in technology wasn't a realistic expectation. Then it was a way to extend the use of a component in a rapidly progressing world.

It still is now in some respects but, increasingly, it's simply about the pleasure you get from getting something for nothing. If you're worried about the damage that stressing your components will do, then it's probably wise to only attempt overclocking when you're starting to think about upgrading anyway.

A successful overclock could extend the working life of a machine, enabling you to increase the performance and put off that upgrade for a while. Of course, it's rare that you'll be able to match the performance increase that a simple hardware upgrade offers, but even a few extra frames per second can make the difference between a playable and unplayable game.

And it's not just on the desktop that a good overclock can help either, although laptop overclocking is far trickier and fraught with more danger. That said, a simple downloaded EXE file for the diminutive Eee701 Asus laptop enables a significant processor overclock that smoothed out both gaming and media playback on our machine no end.

We'll stick with graphics card overclocking for the moment, though, because that can offer a far more tangible benefit than a processor overclock, and will generally offer you a route less likely to irrevocably break your system.

It can all be done through Windows Vista, too, so there's no nasty BIOS tweakery necessary, and all the programs you need are freely available. Just follow the walkthrough below to get a graphical gain for free.