Help Nuke Fix His Computer!

[Nuketheplace]

Ok heres the problem every time I play any game let it be ns, Half Life , or Starwars: Galaxies my computer crashes.  This isn't some little crash that I can fix with Ctrl + Alt + Del ether, its one of those crashes that happen every 5 minutes that force me to restart my computer.  Once it even crashed when I was running WinAmp.  Now I'm fairly sure its a hardware problem, because I Fdisked my computer, only installed one game and it still crashed.  

I'm at a loss to where I should actually start trouble shooting for this bug.  My video card works fine, my sound card is built into the motherboard (nforce 2 mobo) and I haven't touched anything inside my computer sence I left for my trip.  My working theroy is that its over heating.  Right now as I'm typing this my CPU is running at 32 C and my system temp is 39 C.  The CPU frequently gets up to around 60 C when its doing something that requires work.   Right now I'm using the stock fan from the CPU box ( I built my computer from scratch) and its running at 3924 RPM.  In case any of you were wondering I'm using a Amd AMD Athlon™ XP 2400+ and its running at 2 Ghz.

Anyway my question is two fold.  Do all of you think my diagnosis of the problem is correct, and if so do any of you know of any good, cheep fans that could solve my problems?  I'll be glad to answer any other questions about my computer.

Edit: I'm looking at the heat of my computer at the time that it froze and its not running that hot only around 30 C for the CPU and 42 C for the system.

[lolfighter]

The thought that immediately sprang to my mind is "memory". If you have more than one stick of memory, try removing them in turns and see if that solves the memory. A corrupted stick of memory can cause horrible horrible crashes (and global VAC bans <_< ).

Edit: Those temperatures don't look critical at all. Iirc correctly chips work correctly up to around 90° C, although I'd prefer to stay well below that to be on the safe side.

[Nuketheplace]

Thanks lolfighter I'll try removeing one of the sticks and see if that works.  Hopefuly I'll see you all soon.

[BobTheJanitor]

I use this memory tester at work all the time. Let it loop through 5 or 10 times (might need to run it overnight if you've got a lot of RAM) and see if it finds anything. Most memory is lifetime warranty, so if anything's bad, you can probably get it replaced easily enough.

[Dubbilex]

Yeah - AMD chips are pretty renowned for their ability to catch on fire without proper cooling  :p

Anyhow, I would say it could be one of three things: the memory (which has already been mentioned - run those tests pronto), the motherboard (mine recently fried itself and I was getting some strange crash-every-little-while-without-warning-behavior), or the hard drive (mine also crapped out recently.  I HAVE THE BEST LUCK WITH HARDWARE, K?)

But I doubt it could be anything other than those three things.  And replacing all three would run you less than 300 (and you'd get some nice hardware, to boot - perhaps a brand new mobo and a pentium 4, eh?).

Yeah - try the RAM first

[SwiftSpear]

definitely sounds like a RAM issue to me...

Although I would't write off a mobo issue, a possible video card issue (probably driver related if this is the case), or possibly an issue with corrupt onboard sound (I've had all kinds of issues with the stupid things)...

[Satiagraha]

I'm using the same CPU, but a diff fan (more powerful fan), and I frequently get the temp up to low 50s. I set an alarm on my system speaker at 53 degrees in which I turn off the computer. I've never felt comfortable letting it go over that much heat. Perhaps your continuous reaching of high temps affected your system? But I doubt it, it does sound like a RAM issue.

[holy_devil]

winxp? perhaps you have the restart on error thing turned on.

as far as cooling goes; do you experience extreme lag before this happens? if not, it probably isn't overheating.

if it isn't the winxp thing i'm not sure then, perhaps bad ram? how much of what kind do you have :?

[Nuketheplace]

I've ruled out ram as the souse of the problem.  I have two sticks and I've run checks on both of them separately and together.  On top of that I used two memory checker programs,  both sticks of ram checked out. I've also ran games with only one stick of ram in my computer.  Even with the ram separated from the other stick when I was playing games the sticks of ram both froze up.

As for what type of ram I have I don't know.  It was a Christmas present from my dad and all I know is that its Pc 3200 with 256 MB.  I'm going to do more research into the exact type of ram I have when my dad gets home.  For now I think I'm going to check out other options such as the on board sound and the video card ( thank god I have 6 computers at my house).  If anyone has any other ideas on what I should look for I'll take it.  Hopefuly I'll be playing ns b5 when it comes out.

[BobTheJanitor]

Run dxdiag maybe, see if any errors pop up there. Could be vid card or sound related, tis true. If you can, snag those parts from one of the other computers and swap out, see what effects that has. You might go download 3dmark so you have an easy test utility. Just start it looping its benchmarks and come back in a while to see if it's locked. I recommend 3dmark 2001 unless you've got some good hardware to run it on. It'll run faster and the effect will be the same. You just want to simulate playing games, and put a load on your hardware, which it does perfectly.