Help With PC Problem please

[ClintEastwood]

Hi guys i wonder if anyone can give me any advice please.

After 7 weeks of torment of buying a pc off some russian guy of ebay i have been using my pc for like 2-3 weeks.

After playing Never Winter Nights(NWN) on my pc i decide to transfer my HD(20GB) from my old pc to my new one.

Everything seems fine for a while.

What happens every night is i will start up NWN and the game will work either multiplayer or single player for a matter of seconds to minutes and then it will totally crash or crash to the desktop. This also goes for Star Wars Galaxies=SWG. NWN does not require state of the art graphics to play.

My specs are:

AMD Athlon 2800 Xp
Windows Xp Pro
80 GB HD
NVidia Geforce 4 MMX 440
CMedia On Board Audio
CD Writer

I have reinstalled graphics drivers, reinstalled windows, reinstalled NWN. And still i have the same problem. So i thought it was my 2nd HD so i disconnected the power and the cable to Mother Board. This has made no difference. I changed my Graphics card from Geforce 4 MMX440 to Geforce 2 MMX 440(from my old machine). Still this has made no difference.

Strange thing is i can surf the web, play online virtual java games(ie at games.com like monopoly). I assumed this was graphics card related and i thought by changing graphics cards this would solve the problem but alas no.

The specs needed to play SWG and NWN are easily in my requirements and i dont understand why the game crashes on NWN but with SWG tends just to send me back to desktop.

My guess this is Temperature related but im not sure. I have tried taking side panel off and moving cable for better air flow but no change. This morning i actually got 5 minutes game play before total crash. Before all this i could play for hours before any type of crash and even then the crash with NWN would only be to the desktop not a total systems failure type thing.

Anyway guys any idea or thoughts please i would appreciate the help. Thanxx.....

 

[muckshifter]

Drivers drivers drivers

Check the event log, there may be some "general protection faults" that occurred when one of XP's many services decided to automatically load after into a gamings session. Grrr.

This is not terribly complicated stuff:
go to the control panel, open up the system folder, go to the applications, open the event viewer. There will be an error log somewhere in there that outlines the fault.

Then, go to an XP tweaking site, say blackviper.com, and get a guide for the different services that XP runs.

Go to the start menu, Run msconfig, and shut off everything that you don't need to have running on your system: Remote procedure calls, universal plug-an-play, whatever you can think you can live without. Blackviper has a pretty good guide for this.

Make sure you back up before you do this. This is serious stuff ... you can break some important stuff when doing this. Create a restore point, create a full backup, backup your registry, and all that.

Get the latest drivers (actually, make sure that your whole system is current-audio, video, modems, etc.)

Good luck