Overclocked my E6700 - what did I screw up?

so, after much hesitation, I overclocked my E6700. I took it from 2.67 ghz to 3.33 ghz. I did this only for a brief time (a few hours) and then brought it back to 3.0 ghz. I had it like this for about a day. Then, suddenly, Vista froze while I was using the internet. Now, Vista takes about 5 mins to load and there is obviously something wrong once it actually loads. devices are not loading. programs seem to work fine, however.

I reset my bios as well, so no more overclocking.

what gives?

Temps were fine while I had it overclocked. Im hoping this is just a stupid vista problem and not my cpu!

You may have corrupted a core file needed for your OS. Or it could be a driver. Hard to say.

reinstall sorry

One important thing to remember when overclocking via FSB is to make sure you lock the PCI-E bus to 100MHz and the PCI bus to 33.33MHz. If you don't, these buses will run at a percentage of the core clock speed and thus be overclocked. SATA drives are really sensitive to PCI-E bus overclocking. You very well could have corrupted some files on your HDD.

I would say that overclocking in and of itself is not the problem, doing a little research first would have been advisable. A lot of do-it-yourselfers overclock. Some just to say they did it, others buy a more cost effective solution and overclock it to get the performance that they would have got for twice as much or more. Overclocking when done reasonably and responsibly can be very productive.