Hiya,
I recently bought a new computer and I've been having a problem with it that I've been trying to fix for a week. This could be posted in the Games, Windows 2000 or this forum, but I decided to post here because I think its a hardware problem. The computer specs are:

Windows 2000 Pro
AMD Sempron 2800
MSI K8MM3 Motherboard
512MB RAM
Asus N6200 AGP Graphics Card (based on NVidia GeForce 6200)
80GB Maxtor Hard Drive

The motherboard has onboard graphics and it run fine using these onboard graphics, but the PC was bought to play games like the Sims 2 on, so I bought a new graphics card which was the Asus A9250 (based on the ATI Radeon 9250). When playing the Sims 2, after about 10 minutes the game would crash and a an ATI GPU Recovery message would come up. I thought there may have been a compatability issue with the ATI card and the motherboard or a problem with the card, so I returned it to the shop and got the card listed above.

However my problems continued. This time when the Sims 2 was played, after about 10-15 mins the screen would go blue (not the BSOD, just like the screen in the game would turn blue instead of the game being displayed) and the Sims 2 music would continue playing and the Sims 2 type cursor would still be displayed and movable. To get the game working again, a restart was required.

I tried the graphics card from my PC which is working perfectly fine in my machine which is an MSI RX9250. However, the same problems occured as with the other ATI graphics card.

All drivers have been updated on the PC for everything, all Windows Updates are installed, BIOS has been updated, everything inside the PC is in order (everything connected correctly, etc).

The computer only has a CPU fan, not a case fan and I thought that there could be an overheating problem so I installed a case fan from one of my other PCs and the problems still continued. Any help for this problem that has troubled me would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks,
Owen

Is it just Sims 2 or any other games/applications?

I have tried FarCry but not for long enough to check whether problems are caused. It is my sisters computer and I've been struggling to find time to test out any other game on the PC. Tommorow I'll give Driv3r a try on the PC and see if this causes any problems, because it could be the Sims 2 and I'm not ruling that out (and the Sims 2 does have the latest patch).

I have now tested Driv3r on the computer and as with the Sims 2, the PC crashes.

Try this:

Go to Start -> Run and type dxdiag

Wait for the bar to load up and go through each page, making sure there are no DirectX problems and that all tests are successful.

I've already done that and all tests are successful.