hey, my pc keeps locking up at random times so i have to reboot. It happens most when i play games somtimes after a few mintues and sometimes just after a few seconds.
so i thought it was my ram that was faulty but today i got a new 512mb stick of ram and it still happens. I have also formated the comp and reinstalled windows so i am pritty sure it's hardware related. Any help would be amazing.
thanks Graeme

Any chance you could get hold of another graphics card? You may well find that it's the graphics card that's the problem, even if you've re-installed the latest drivers, which I assume you've done if you've formatted the PC.

If not, try installing the latest graphics card drivers!

Try upgrading to the latest version of DirectX, which is available through Windows Update (which will detect whether you need it or whether you already have it) or by checking for newer version at http://www.microsoft.com/directx.

Go to Start Menu > Settings > Control Panel > Display > Advanced > Troubleshooting and reduce the graphics acceleration from Full to the minimum value. If your games still run, do they run without crashing? If they don't run, go back to that screen and set the adjuster to the middle of the range.

Hope one of those ideas helps - let us know

Anyone else got any suggestions?

P.S. What version of Windows is it, what graphics card are you using and does it crash most often with any one particular game?

thanks for all your help, i will try reducing the hardware acceleration.
I have a geforce 4200 and windows XP. It crashes on all games after a certain amount of time. At first as i said i thought it was ram then after the new ram didnt fix the problem i guessed it must be the gfx card. I think it's over heating and causing everything to lock up. The fan on the gfx card is working but the card still gets extremely hot.

That's just what I was thinking

Sounds like a nice modern graphics card (I don't know much about GeForce cards but it's a pretty big number, lol!). Along with the joy of high-speed big-memory graphics cards though comes the burden of big heat build-up.

I bet that, if you ran a really intensive screen saver for a couple of hours and then quickly went into a game, it would lock up straight away ........ but if you left it ticking over on a scrolling text screensaver for a couple of hours, the game would last longer. I would suggest that that should prove whether it's overheating

You could also try running the system with the case off ...... and running a small electric fan next it .... just to see if it makes a difference!