Alright.. so lately my computer has been a royal pain in the behind and I have tried everything I know and then some but still no answer seems to be the right one.. so I turn to my fellow Gongumenn for help!
My computer freezes up on me when I play certain games or movies/game introes lately. The two games I have experienced this in, are Age of Conan and Warhammer 40.000 - Soulstorm. When I play the intro for AoC my computer just locks up completely and I need to do a hard reboot. And in most, not all ??, the movie clips in Warhammer my computer does the same.
I have tried removing then updating my Gfx drivers and sound drivers. I have swapped my 300W power supply for a 560W one. I have removed then added RAM. I have removed most of my movie players and codex's. I don't know what else to try to get it to work *grumble* Any of you have any ideas that might help this fellow out ?
Let's try the obvious first. Your computer might be overheating. This typically happens during peak performance loads, such as in-game movie clips. I'm guessing your computer is so new that you can see the temperature of the CPU and mainboard, so check that first.
Second, it could be a driver conflict. Try to disable your sound card and see if that makes your computer not crash. Press win+break, go to Hardware > Device Manager > Sound, Video and Game controllers > Your sound card, right-click and select Disable. (Btw, under the Sound, Video and Game controllers category you can also see which audio and video codecs you really have installed, but it's not easy to know which are supposed to be there, and which can be safely removed.) Could be other drivers that conflict, but this is the first to try.
Third, it could be some hardware conflict. Usually, this would be one of the graphics card, mainboard, and RAM that don't get along well together with one of the others. Make sure your BIOS is updated as a first step in solving this problem.
Try these and see if it helps, or tell us if you already have. Also, you might want to post your computer's specs and the make and model of your hardware (mainboard, cpu, graphics card, audio card, and RAM too, if you know)
When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls
I hope this helps, but as Vuzman suggests, it could be a heating problem. I tried removing the cabinet, and that worked fine for me, but obviously it's not a permanent solution.
I have no idea what card you're using, but I stumbled on this comparison-picture: Showing that the 8500GT isn't really a gamers card.
It runs fine for a while (sometimes even for days), then it starts freezing up completely all of the time.
It doesn't matter what game or application is running, so I've had the hardware under suspicion.
Have tried updating all drivers (latest BIOS update available is from late 2005) and have tested it for heating, but to no avail.
No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences.
No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions.
Not even death.
-R. Scott Bakker. 'The Prince of Nothing'
Showing that the 8500GT isn't really a gamers card.
