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"Baffling PC problem..."

... all of a sudden, all of my games crash after a few minutes.
not crash out to the desktop, but do a total resetting of my machine.

to be fair, i was considering doing a rebuild soon as it is, but i'd like to know what could possibly be causing it so i can check a step at a time if/when i DO rebuild.

i'm running:

MSI KT6 Delta L mobo (1gig of ram, which i tested and is fine)
Athlon XP3000
Gforce FX5700
Windows 2000
DirectX 9c

it's utterly baffling as everything used to run fine.
i thuoght Far Cry may be crashing due to the no-cd patch i added, but then it occured to me that Star Wars Battlefront has ALWAYS crashed on one specific level (meanig i can't finish the damn thing :D )
so i installed a fresh new demo of Flatout and that crashed as well. i installed latest drivers for gforce and that seems stable now, i played it for about 10 minutes without any hassles.. but when i tried far cry again, that crashes out where it never used to.

any clues?
anyone... bueller?

im lost.....

Nimco wrote:
> Does W2K have an Event Viewer like XP does?

Yes

Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer

kukgv wrote:
> NERDS!

N00b :P

NERDS!

Power supply is only a few months old.
i ran the RAM test until it said 100%.. then i had to go to bed.
i'll dry updating the mobo drivers, but it's probably about time i built a new one anyways as it scored quite badly on 3dmark05 and i need it to be a graphics monster for work.

If you have a desk fan pushing air through your PC case at the time it shuts down then it's not overheating, unless the fan on your graphics card has failed. How sure are you that the memory is okay? How long did you run the test for?

It could also be the power supply dying.

Ignore this!!!!

I find when it comes to games, the graphics card drivers are ususally to blame, as over time, as windows auto-updates itself, the drivers find themselves having to work on an operating system that may have changed quite considerably since they were written...

Solution: Always check for the latest Graphics card drivers... Oh and sometimes the soundcard and motherboard drivers can fall behind as well.

EDIT: I realise you already updated your GFX drivers... try the other components as well as a last resort you could try re-installing DirectX 9

It's normal temperature I guess.

But when you play games, those temps can go through the roof.

hmmm, interesting.
it's leaning towards overheating then?
this is odd as i'm not putting any more work on it than usual and the case is already open with an office fan on it (so i can leave it rendering overnight sometimes) and it's never overheated before.

mobo: 49 C
CPU: 52 C

... is that good or bad?