Evergreen puts brakes on wannabe overclockers

Evergreen Technologies has released an AcceleraPCI upgrade for Pentium systems that includes a BIOS lock that prevents unauthorised access to the configuration options.

The company developed the lock after requests from a school district in Virginia for something that would prevent deliberate and accidental tampering with settings by students.

Once the settings are locked, there is no prompt to access the configuration during boot up, and even if a user does press F1 it will have no effect.

Evergreen has given three examples of the kind of tampering with AcceleraPCI upgraded machines it wants to prevent with the BIOS lock, and unsurprisingly the overclockers come in for some stern looks.

Firstly a user could disable the card altogether, reducing the performance of the machine, Evergreen says. Then it warns about overclocking attempts, namely messing around with the bus speed or altering the voltage leaving a busted or unstable system.

Clearly not a product for the "go faster" fanatics out there, but probably quite an attractive proposition for a sys admin, either in a school, office or government department who needs to keep unruly users under control. ®

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More information can be found on the Evergreen web site.