Hello all.
I play a variety of games on my system, and haven't had any problems for a long time.
Recently however, somes games i play (Battlefield 2, Counter Strike: Source, and others) have begun crashing, badly, after a period of time during play.
Here are some screenshots of one scenario of the crash:





These funky colours and shapes may appear after any period of time, but never straight away.

In another scenario of the crash - in any full screen ap game - the game just freezes and skips the sound thats playing at the time. The only way to get out of the crash is a hard reset.

Here are my specs:
Board: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. M61SME-S2
2.10 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
2048 Megabytes Installed Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT

Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
Sam.

Hi,

I recently developed a similar problem and it turned out to be dust in my PC. I opened my PC and hoovered it and removed all the cards and memory, cleaned them and reseated them. I also removed the CPU and heatsink and thoroughly cleaned that.

I'm not saying that this will cure your problem but it may help.

Another possible solution is to go to the Nvidia website and download the latest graphics driver for your card. Here is the link- http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Please post if this helped.

Regards.

Thankyou for the quick reply geo -

I had problems with games crashinga few months back and discovered that i didnt have the latest drivers, and that seemed to have fixed it.
so im pretty sure im up to date.

as for the dust thing - ill bring it into my work tomorrow and blow all the dust out with this air hose thing. Ill let you know it works.

cheers,
sam.

i went in to work today and gave it a big blow out (including the heat sink) with the air hose. I also (embarrasingly) discovered that the vents where hot air exits my tower, were right up against the wall of the desk. I've proceeded to move the computer (annoyingly) to the otherside of the desk.

Im SURE that the fact that it wont overheat now and the dust is removed should fix the problem.
i'll keep you posted.

thanks for the help,
sam.

i went in to work today and gave it a big blow out (including the heat sink) with the air hose. I also (embarrasingly) discovered that the vents where hot air exits my tower, were right up against the wall of the desk. I've proceeded to move the computer (annoyingly) to the otherside of the desk.

Im SURE that the fact that it wont overheat now and the dust is removed should fix the problem.
i'll keep you posted.

thanks for the help,
sam.

EDIT: sigh, i just played a game of CSS for about an hour before i started trippin' on funky colours again.
i dont believe its an overheating problem.

any other ideas?