pt's "how to Tuesday" Overclocking your Pocket PC

Okay, we're moving the "How-to's" to Tuesday, why? To compete with American Idol of course. This week's how-to is how to overclock your Pocket PC. Why would you want to do this? speeeeed of course, up to 50% faster in some cases, but you can also (in theory) get better battery life and better performance if you underclock your device when you don't need all the speed and overclock when you do.

There are many different tools and articles that really dive in to the specific results on Pocket PC models; we have links to those at the end of this article. This how-to is to just get you up and running quickly, literally.

Ingredients:

• A PC/Mac whatever to install an application on the Pocket PC

• XScale Pocket PC (iPAQ 2215, iPAQ 4155, iPAQ 4355, Axim X3, Asus A620, Asus A716, iPAQ 3955, Toshiba e740, Toshiba e750/755, Toshiba e800, Axim X5, iPAQ 5455, 5555, but should work for all XScale 400MHz Pocket PC's).

• No fear, that's right. When you do something like this there is a chance, albeit a small one that you can screw up your device- if you're worried about this, don't do it.

For our example we're going to use Immiersoft's XCPUScalar. Get the application here and install. There is a trial version that doesn't have all the features activated and you can only use it 15 times for the most part, but it's good enough to test with. If you like it, buy it $12.95 is a small price for that time you'll be getting back and battery life you're saving.

After installing, go to Programs > XCPUScalar. Tap the application to start.

On the main screen you'll see a few options, for our example we're using a HP 2215. You can slide the slider to adjust the speed, we're going to punch it up to 472 mhz.

And that's pretty much it, you can tap OK and speed demon through your apps, or tap File > Cancel to cancel the changes. In the full version the device will adjust based on CPU load, so when nothing is going on it slows down, but when you're playing a game it goes fast.

There's a meter tab that gives you a great view of what the current status of CPU, Battery Life, Memory Storage and Memory program.

In the advanced section you can set the speed to scale as percent of the CPU load.

And last up, under options you can get even more speed by setting frequencies over 500 MHz, this might not work, it might mess up your device and you'll need to soft reset, but it's fun to play around with.

So what type of speed gains can you expect?

Generally speaking, I noticed a pretty good speed bump, so if you find yourself waiting on apps or run some intense stuff, it might be worth checking out. Besides if you have a Xscale Pocket PC phone, it's cool to say you Overclocked your Phone.

Here are results other people are getting with Overclocking tools on their Pocket PC and some links.

MTekk: Benchmarking the Overclocked Xda II (with Spb Benchmark, GXMark and PPC Mark).
PC Counselor: Benchmark and Battery Life Tests on the HP 2215.
ImmierSoft: Overclocking tool we used in this example.
Pocket Hack Master: Great Overclocking tool.

Comments? Questions? Email me: phillip@flashenabled.com or visit me here : http://www.flashenabled.com

Stay tuned this week for e3 coverage!!