interest in overclocking

i recently remade my computer, after one upgrade lead to another and so on. all of the reviews of products that i got off of newegg always spoke of safely increasing speeds through overclocking.
so when i had more time i wanted to see if some one could lead me through it possibly. i have looked briefly into it, but since most things started in the bios, something i dont ofter use. i imagined it safer to ask some one here rather than try and read and experiment with something i knew nothing about really.

i am running windows vista ultimate x64, with an amd athlon 64 x2 dual core processor 5200+ 2.70 ghz. along with 2x2gb s.skill memory, nvidia geforce 9500 gt, on a foxconn a7gm-s motherboard(am2+ support). o, and a 500w power supply that came with my smilodon raidmax case if that matters.
i dont know if there are any more details needed to paint this picture accurately, but there are at least the general components.

i imagine that most any component/processor can be overclocked to some extent...but the limited looking into oc'ing that i did seemed to possibly suggest that the speed of the memory might factor in. i am unaware of what my original rams speed was, but the current one is 800 i believe. i am not sure if that would lessen my options since its not 1060 or whatever the other option was.

anyway, thank you for any help that you can provide.

 

Here is a site that is a fairly comprehensive tutorial for overclocking.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/newbie-oc-guide.html
http://smileys.on-my-web.com/repository/Computer/computer-28.gif

 

ok thank you, i will read further into it later.
i also found some tutorial speaking of using cpuz, speedfan, and clockgen. hoping to piece it together later.

 

i have read most all of the link that you included, along with others that i looked up. although i think i understand the basics at least, i think i would prefer to be lead a bit with this.
these doubts are further developed by the fact that my motherboard came with some software for monitoring and altering frequencies, speeds and so on. the motherboard is a foxconn brand and the program is called "foxone". there was even a "auto overclocking" in the case of the cpu. i am not sure that any monitoring program ever showed a constant raiting for my cpu. nor have a noticed a clear increase, decrease or any other effects.
i let the auto overclock function run, which eventually produced a blue screen of death. so i restarted, and upon restarting that program, it said that it recommended i set it to 233. i think it may have originally been 200(i imagine this is the frequency if i understand my parts right).
both under these new conditions and the original 200, the multiplier seemed to keep changing. rendering a fluctuating amount of mhz, like seeing 3100 then 2900 and 1200. or something to that effect, essentially never going below 1000, but hitting 1, 2 , and 3 mhz every so often.

it doesn't seem to stay at the same rating at all, and i am wonder what may cause this and if it is anywhere near normal. as i said i don't recall if my system ever had a constant mhz amount, yet for all i know this system might have come with it being auto overclocked already.