My computer has been doing very well, performing without any problems whatsoever for the last year, but following my move from school to home, which was a 7 hour car ride, while playing a game, the computer will play, and then freeze up after perhaps 5-10 minutes (it also happens to be when the game just starts to become exciting). It happened once the first day I was back, last Thursday, during GTA3: SA. Then it happened a couple more times on Friday and Saturday. And then on Sunday, it happened every time I had a game playing. (All the games I have right now are GTA3:SA, Flatout2 and Rome: Total War and it happens on all of them) Anyone know what could stop this crashing? It never happens if the programs open are not games (i.e. Word, iTunes, Firefox, etc...)

Possible changes in the system that might have an effect:
- day that I left school, I cleaned out the dust on the inside of the case, including removing the processor heat-sink. I've done this a couple times, but you never know if something might have gotten messed up.
- on Sunday, a mod for Rome: Total War (I bought the game also on Sunday) was recommended to me by a friend, so I d/led and installed everything, and tried playing that. Though, it too crashed within 5 minutes. After deleting and reinstalling all Rome: TW files, Rome didn't work either.

My system specs are:
Processor: AMD Athlon (tm) 64 Processor 3200+
Gfx: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
RAM: 2GB
OS: Windows XP

I can't think of anything else to include in this, but hopefully it helps.

I have since my first post, removed and reinstalled Rome again and it still freezes up after a few minutes. Also crashing stopped in GTA as much as it did previously. Perhaps it was just a few isolated incidences in GTA and Flatout2 and that the problem is really just with Rome...