The CPU in a Palm device is capable of running at much higher speeds than the speeds set in the factory. The Palm IIIx, like many modern Palm devices, uses the Motorola Dragonball EZ chip running at 16 Mhz. The Palm Vx runs the identical chip at 20 Mhz. From that fact alone, you can see that Palm doesn't run this chip at maximum capacity. In fact, the top speed on this chip is probably 32 Mhz, double the factory speed. Palm probably chose to run its chips at less than the factory maximum for a number of reasons, including battery life (slower chips use less power), device size (slower chips run cooler, eliminating the need for fans), and production cost (slower chips don't need to be tested at higher speeds).

These corporate decisions, however, don't need to govern your own device. Because of the user-friendly ease of the Palm OS, programs have arisen to make overclocking a simple task for the average user. Many programs even allow you to tweak specific programs. You can run that bulky document editor at 22 Mhz and run the zippy little hearts game at 10 or 13 Mhz.

Overclocking isn't the only way to change the speed of your device. You can also tweak the wait-states in the RAM. Technically, this is even more esoteric than overclocking. For some reason, when the CPU accesses the RAM, it sometimes enters a "wait-state." During this time, it isn't doing anything. Several extremely user-friendly programs exist to reduce or eliminate these wait-states. This noticeably increases the device speed without the need for dangerous operations on the internal clock or the risk of overheating.

The whys (and why nots) of overclocking
There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to overclocking your device. There is no "right" decision on this one. Overclocking is right for some people and completely wrong for others.

Advantages
Increasing the speed of your Palm device can have undeniable advantages. There are a number of "power user" programs out there that are very large and very slow. My favorite example is TakeNote!, the document editing program from Landware at http://www.landware.com/takenote/index.html. I wrote large portions of this article using that program. TakeNote! is a wonderful, incredibly useful editor, but it runs so mind-numbingly slow that I'm sometimes tempted to take out my frustrations on the helpless LCD screen of my Palm IIIx.

Without overclocking, TakeNote! takes 17 seconds of my valuable time to start up, import the list of Doc files, and display the current file. With the wait-states removed, it goes down to 14 or 15 seconds. Overclocked with Afterburner 3.0 to a nice reasonable 20 Mhz, and with the wait-states removed, it takes 11 seconds. At a daredevil 29 Mhz with wait-states eliminated, it happens in 8 seconds. This may not seem like a lot, but when you have a brilliant turn of phrase in mind for an upcoming article and you need to write it in before you forget, 17 seconds can seem like a decade. The lowered blood pressure alone is worth the price of any overclocking program.