When playing games on my PC it often crashes and restarts the computer. I recently bought a graphics card for it and I think that is when the problem started, even though I do have the latest drivers.

What could the problem be ? Can anyone help ?
Thanks

is it seated correctly, is the RAM seated correctly?

If you find that the hardware is installed correctly and the problem persists then:


Look in your Event viewer: rt. click My Computer then click Manage then Event Viewer.
Or: Administrative Tools/Event Viewer or Start/Run/ eventvwr
Open the system as well as the application tabs & look for red X errors. Click error line for details.
Post back the source & event id & Description especially of errors that seem to coincide with this issue.
Also check the Information lines that might coincide with this issue.

How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP



Also:

Go to start | search (type in) .dmp
Note the location of your .dmp files.

Then:

1) Download and install the
Debugging Tools from Microsoft
2) Download and install this
debugwiz
3) Open the Wiz & Browse to, or paste in the path to, your .dmp file.
4) After the Wiz creates a Text document attach it back to this thread.

First of all the graphics card and RAM appear to be connected properly to the motherboard.

So, I looked in the event viewer and these are the red crosses that I saw:

Source: Cdrom
Event ID: 7 ( this was by far the most frequent error, appearing about 30 times in a matter of seconds [according to the "time" column] )

Source: DCOM
Event ID: 10010

Source: System error
Event ID: 1003


I downloaded the debugging tools from microsoft, do i not have to do anything with this ?

My .dmp files, of which there are 2, are in C:\Windows\Minidump

Here is the text file:

Opened log file 'c:\debuglog.txt'

Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 6.6.0007.5
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Loading Dump File [C:\Windows\Minidump]
Could not open dump file [C:\Windows\Minidump], Win32 error 5
"Access is denied."

You do nothing with the Debugging Tools from Microsoft. They just need to be on your computer.

The Debug Wiz is a DOS command batch file that commands the Debugging Tools.

Did you get that "Access is denied" via the DeBug Wiz?

Are you running these games from the CD drive?

Yes i got the access denied message from the debug wiz.

The main game I play is Counter Strike: Source, this crashes quite a lot but it is often inconsistent. Sometimes I can play for 45mins without it crashing but sometimes it will crash after 10mins or less. This game is not run from the CD drive.

However when playing games from the CD drive, they do crash too.

The only Event error that was significant was the CD-ROM error.

If you have other dumps please try them in the WIZ.

As far as I know the Access Denied error indicates a corrupt dump log. (assuming that you are logged in as an Administrator).