Schoolboy errors with Overclocking

Hello my learned superiors,
I am reading as much as I can about computers in general and specifically about overclocking with a view to OC'ing my Q6600.

I'm not after specifics or anything like that (great guide Graysky thanks) just your combined wisdom on the schoolboy errors YOU made in your early overclocking careers, so that I may avoid them and stand on the shoulders of giants and bask in uber gigahertz glory

So...what errors did you make, whatever they are, which if you knew then what you know now would never ever have happened.

Yours admiringly
Andy

I decided to help my friend overclock his AMD system about five years ago. (Actually, I was the one who convinced him to.) I did this without knowing a thing about overclocking. I forgot the chip he had, but I remember it was locked, but there was a way to unlock it by using a graphite pencil to close a connection between two electrodes on the CPU. We tried this, and to make a long story short, blew the chip and MB. Since I was the one that pushed him, I bought him a new CPU and MB.

Lets just say I came a long way since then. Now I have a stable 33% overclock. Yay!

'I did this without knowing a thing about overclocking'

Ha brilliant! I am familiar with this philosophy definitely, not just when it comes to computers either...

I second the annoyance of multimedia keyboards, I have gone back to a basic, small no nonsense keyboard so I cant press buttons with bizarre functions that I have no clue how to fix because I never read the manuals...now I think about it, who DOES?

JSC,

I didn't know they were overclocking WAY back then. I think my family got its first PC around 1990-92. I remember it was a 286. But it had this funny turbo button on the front. LOL. If I put it into turbo mode it went from 8Mhz to 12Mhz . . . whoa. So, officially I have been overclocking since then . . . . .