No matter how your system stacks up at the moment 2.4ghz shouldnt be a problem. tbh You will gain very little increasing it by 175mhz.
Depends on the core. If you're lucky, you could hit 2.8-3GHz. However, if you don't have voltage adjustments, your success could be considerably lower. There's some decent overclocking with some cheap motherboards, but others don't do as well. It just depends on the motherboard, CPU, and luck. Whatever the case take it slow. For each overclock increase, fire up [google]Prime95[/google] for AT LEAST 12 hours, if not 24+, and let it run. If you don't get any errors, you're good to go. I'd go with small increases and not huge leaps. I'd probaly not do more than 10MHz increments on the Front Side Bus (FSB, and the only way you'll be overclocking).
its prescott i think , so it will be stable if i take it to about 2.6ghz in small steps ,and i can do the stress test without booting windows right?
I'm not sure of any stress program that would target the CPU. Prime 95 is installed (you can also use Stress Prime, which just takes the Torture Test and gives you a prettier interface) in Windows, and must be run from there. Memtest 86 can be burned to CD or put on a floppy and booted off of. That's good for testing your RAM, which errors can affect you getting into Windows, where a CPU OC'd a little too far won't cause problems normally, due to less being in the CPU at any given time. Whatever's being run at the time is in RAM, therefore, the program (or OS) will crash with bad RAM). If the CPU isn't being taxed, you probably won't notice errors immediately. As far as run times for Memtest, run it 3 hours, if not 8/overnight to give it a good thrashing. The goal is no errors.
