My XP unlocking experience!

This was performed on a xp1700 on the new IWILL xp333 mobo. Also using 512meg's of ICZ PC2700 DDR.

OK, here's the way I did it. First thing I did to unlock the processor was assemble to tools. You can get mainframe repair pens, I suggest this rather then a brush system. Use clear packing tape rather then scotch, it sticks better. Tweezers are a must for placing the tape. Any old razor will do but I suggest a retractable kind. A bright bright light, you can never have too much light. And a sowing needle or small sharp pin.

The jumpers, if you haven't looked at them, are amazingly smaller than I thought they would be. The pictures on THG unlocking guide make them look sizeable. But in reality I would guess they are somewhere around a 16th of an inch wide. <b>DO NOT TRY IT FREE HAND!!</b> Whatever you do, don't get lazy and try making the connections free hand, you'll just make a mess and have to erase it and start over.

After connecting the first 2 free hand I realized that I couldn't get enough of the silver laquor on there free hand to make a good connection. So I erased it, went back and did it with the tape and it was much much better. Tom's guide didn't mention this, but I highly suggest getting a magnifyling light or good handheld magnifying lense to look at your work with. I have better than 20/20 vision and it was tough for me to make sure there was no connection between the paint on the jumpers. I taped off well, it's just that everything is so small you have to be sure. That's where the pin comes in, use the pinhead to scrape the excess dried paint off. There probably wasn't enough there to matter, but I wanter to be sure before I risked my $150 processor.

After making the connections, I first clocked the processor down for testing purposes. 133 x 8 = 1064. Beautiful!! Then I ramped up the FSB to 166 and tryed 166 x 8 = 1328. From there I climbed in 3 mhz incriments until it wouldn't post. Anything past 175 and I think my ram starts to error out. So I backed down to 172 and increased the multiplier till the cpu quite. Not wanting to up my voltage, I got to x9.5. So I'm running a 1.46gig Athlon at 1.63gig. Not bad!! This is all with no voltage being raised above specs.

i've been looking all over for the silver laquer, where did you buy yours?