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Look, I know you’re going to find this hard to believe. But apparently overclocking your CPU will improve your PC’s performance (while decreasing your expected battery life). Shocking, but true. I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Yesterday I visited jkOnTheRun’s Kevin Tofel, who recently installed a BIOS update on his MSI Wind netbook which allows you to boost the CPU speed by 8%, 15%, or 24%. 

Kevin ran a few benchmarks, and surprisingly enough, the CPU performance went up by… about 8%, 15%, and 24%. Of course, memory, hard drive perfromance, and other benchmarks remained pretty much the same. 

The BIOS update also enables some nice features like the ability to automatically underclock your netbook when you unplug the power cable to save battery power. And as Kevin showed me, the power LED now displays three distinct colors to let you know if your netbook is running overclocked, underclocked, or at normal speed.