By "Overclocking" ( literally means "over the clock" - over the specs of the hardware ) a piece of hardware in your machine - most of the times that piece of hardware either is the CPU or the Graphics card - you raise a bit its performance, but you risking damaging the hardware. Depending on your hardware, and how much you "stress" it, that risk might be high or insignifcant
But What you need to do in order to overclock the CPU or the GFX differs from system to system. Generally speaking, it is easier to overclock the GFX card, since this, in most cases ( depending and on your GFX card of course ), can be done from inside the windows. You must find where are the options for the Mhz that the GPU and graphics memory run ( recent driver releases i believe have this option in some tab inside them ), and simply raise their clock numbers. For example if your card's GPU runs, say, on 450Mhz, you can try to raise it to 470-480mhz.
The main CPU of the system most of the times can be overclocked from inside the BIOS, and if you dont have much experience with technical matters on PC's i advice you to not consider touching that.
Modern games rely more on a fast GFX card, so if you consider doing some overclocking on your machine, in order to play games better. i suggest you try first the GFX card approach.
But consider also this. Overclocking is stressing the hardware over its factory limits so a overclocked machine most of the times will run hotter than normal. Even by raising the performance by 10% you will notice a noticable raise in temperature. Temperature is a serious danger for PC's. "Proffesional" overclockers often look first to improve their machine's cooling
If overclocking is done in small steps, with great care, and not hastely, can really improve your machine, and give you a performance gain. To be careful is all that matters.
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