[Ryoku]

Ive tried a few diffrent things to fix my problem but for some reason it wont go away. >.< For the last few months my main compter will crash if I try to play either Final Fantasy XI, WoW, or Phantasy Star Universe for between 30 minutes to over an hour. The strange thing is that it only happens when I try to play these games. I can browse the internet, watch videos and listen to music, and play other games and its perfectly fine. I dunno if its because of my comp over heating or the video card itself, but I would like to hear some other opinions of what could be causing this ti happen. Any suggestions regarding this problem would be appreciated

[Bluefire101]

open the pc case if its a desktop PC (turn it off first) and see for any considerable amount of dust on the fans (including the gfx card fan) and blo on them a bit if they have dust in em, because the dust can slow down fans and make the pc get hotter than its supposed to.

[Ryoku]

Quote: Originally Posted by Bluefire101

open the pc case if its a desktop PC (turn it off first) and see for any considerable amount of dust on the fans (including the gfx card fan) and blo on them a bit if they have dust in em, because the dust can slow down fans and make the pc get hotter than its supposed to.

I forgot to mentioned I tried using compressed air to blow out the dust from inside my computer(it is a desktop). The computer in question is over 4 years old and is a dell if that will help any ^_^;

[Judgment]

Get a program like "Riva Tuner" and use it to monitor the temperature of your GPU, CPU, etc. If it is too hot, try removing dust from the fans (well, the entire tower in general) since they might be clogged up. These three games you have problems with might be more graphic intensive and require more power compared to your other games (considering your pc is old).

Lastly, try checking if these games are allowed in your firewall.

[xibo]

or go ahead and uninstall the firewall since you don t need it anyway -.-
gpu temperature isn t a problem if you only plays old FFs and wow... passive cooled southbridges or uncooled memory modules tend to get alot hotter ( unless maybe you have a geforce fx 5800 ultra first generation card )...
how does your computer crash? does it turn off? does it freeze? does it reboot?
if it reboots or turns off, check the bios settings for behaviour on power failure ( it s what happens if the mainboard receives too much or not enough power, usually a fault of the power unit ). if it freezes, it s a software bug ( means either the operating system or a device driver is probably bugged ).
if it bluescreens try websearching for the title of the bluescreen
either way run a full memory test overnight ( it takes quite long )

EDIT:
* if you re using windows xp or 2k ( if you re using ME it s your own fault ) and you do not have alot of memory, check your settings for paging of anonymous memory. furthermore ( and thanks to XP's praised by everyone for some reason ) XP's incredibly crappy memory management will try to avoid using system memory even if there is alot of system memory availible for allocation; therefore XP will need horrendous amounts of swap space ( again, see settings for paging of anonymous memory, though at my laptop XP just ignores everything i setup there ). Make sure that XP has enough free space to bloat its swap on
* independent of operating system there always exists some possibility to disallow the OS to use swap. If you re running SATA disks, turn swap off ( which will cause everything to reside in system memory and therefore require alot of it ), and if an full screen application hangs up, pull out the SATA cable of the main system disk ( obviously you should not be running any disk-writing proccesses at that time independent of FS in use ). that should cause the operating system ( which is in system memory and doesn t need disk access to do so ) to minimize you full screen app ( in unixes it depends upon the desktop environment used but kde (4.1) will outrightly crash itself when trying to load the image that appears in the fs unmounted dialog and through you back to the command line it was started out of ). however, if you re using windows it will now useless - but you know that the application you were running crashed and not the operating system.

[Ryoku]

Quote: Originally Posted by xibo

or go ahead and uninstall the firewall since you don t need it anyway -.-
gpu temperature isn t a problem if you only plays old FFs and wow... passive cooled southbridges or uncooled memory modules tend to get alot hotter ( unless maybe you have a geforce fx 5800 ultra first generation card )...
how does your computer crash? does it turn off? does it freeze? does it reboot?
if it reboots or turns off, check the bios settings for behaviour on power failure ( it s what happens if the mainboard receives too much or not enough power, usually a fault of the power unit ). if it freezes, it s a software bug ( means either the operating system or a device driver is probably bugged ).
if it bluescreens try websearching for the title of the bluescreen
either way run a full memory test overnight ( it takes quite long )

I can asnwer these in order

1. I dont use a Firewall cause it ends up being more of a pain then a help >.>;

2. The graphics card My comp currently has running is a Radeon x700 which is pretty old now

3. this one is random. when it first happened the screen would go black and then after a minute or 2 the blue screen will appear. Now however, the screen will completely freeze up and then after a few minutes the screen will turn black and the speakers will make a strange screeching noise O.o;

[Dark_Clown]

sounds like a fatal error can have many reasons... i guess some drivers u use just use an irq they shouldn't (most common thing to happen) just try installing other drivers for ur hardware ... but thats only guessing ...

[xibo]

type every driver version installed + name of the corresponding hardware in a websearch. if the drivers are bugged you will find tons of threads in tech boards about it.
have you repartitioned / installed windows on another hdd since it began?

EDIT: also keep in mind that the age of a graphics proccessor ( note that i say graphics proccessor, not graphics chip or 3d accelerator which are outdated terms ) does not have any influence on the temperature it will run. In fact, with the application of advances in the electronic research the chips run less hot then those using older technology.

[arumsido]

just latest think in mind if your driver not update or suddenly any part of program like in windows that deleted