I am, or shall I say used to be, the proud owner of a 5 year old computer. Just recently I have become disgruntled with my machine. A couple months ago I had to replace my power supply, then a couple weeks ago I began having problems with my computer randomly restarting. After sending my computer to the handy neighborhood computer tech shop I was told that my computer had been the victim of a rather nasty virus. The tech guy told me he had rid the computer of the virus, and that the system was running quite well for its age. I proceeded to take the computer home only to start experiencing problems I had never faced before. Now instead of having my system completely restarting at random times, I have problems playing games. Everytime I play a more graphically intensive game (things that are not internet games or windows games) the game will shut down and suddenly revert back to windows a few minutes into playing. I have found that as long as I am just looking and going through menus and other simple tasks, the games will be fine, they only restart when I start playing the game (Madden '06, etc). I have a novice amount of experience dealing with computers, and my guess would be a problem with my video card. I attempted to update my driver. After doing so through Nvidia's site, and going through the installation process and the necessary restart, I found out the update could not be carried out.
If someone could help me out, suggestions as to what should be done to either remedy my current situation, or if I need to upgrade my system would be much obliged. Thank you.
System Specs.
Processor: Pentium 4 2.26ghz
RAM: 512 MB
Video Card: NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4400
OS: Windows XP

I am not much of a gamer but I do know the latest ones require lots of memory to run on. Did you try upgrading your memory to at least 1GB. Computers will sometimes restart without seeing what we call the blue screen of death sometimes not all but system restarts could be associated with memory. Try re-seating them in their banks. If anything since you like playing games on your pc i would go and buy more memory automatically anyways. Your multi-tasking will be much better too. Your processor speed looks fine for it and so does your video.

HI, the first thing I would do since your computer has been to your local tech guy is open up your PC and re-seat all your motherboard connections especially the graphics card. Then when you are happy everything is reseated check around for amounts of dust especially in and around the processor (check the heat sink attached to the top of the cpu).

Now, what AV software are you running? How much space do you have on drive C? Also, have you recently DEFRAGed your hard disks? If you haven't I would recommend it. If you don't know how to do that just right click 'My Computer' and select 'Manage' then select 'Disk Management' and 'Disk Defragmentor'.

Once the above has been done, then try to re-install the latest Video driver again.

Please post results.

Very great,
Keep up the great work.
thank!

Might be a good idea to run something like either SensorviewPro or Speedfan to see what your temps and voltages are:

SensorviewPro

Speedfan

I am having a similiar problem, I just built this system about a month ago, so there is no problem with dust yet. Everything is seated correctly. My temps and voltages have not gone out of safe range either. I am running 3.0 GHz P4 with 2GB of DDR2, and my games have been fine until I bought a NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. Then all of the games that played perfectly on my mobo chipset suddenly started flickering and occasionally crashing. I reinstalled and updated the driver twice, and the tech on the website had no helpful info either.

Cooter,

What brand name and watt power supply are you running with this rig?

Logisys PS480D
Total Power: 330W
Max Power: 480W