thanks, generic full size case, 400w power supply. I had given thought to
overheating and I am going to check out cpu temps etc, but hadn't given
thought to the graphic card overheating. plenty of space in case 5pci slots
with two cards spaced 2 slots apart (habit of mine to promote airflow) but
possible warm air from cpu fan blowing onto graphics card. case fan might
cure problem. Previously had old HD in case with ME installed had same
problem but works fine now its returned to its original box (kids machine
now), thats what was bugging me two seperate OS's different drives but same
problem
thanks a lot, given me a new line of thought  :-)


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Sproule" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 11:39 AM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] winXP


> Can you tell us a bit about the case and power supply that you are using?
> My first suspect would be heat build up.  Does your system offer any sort
> of
> temperature monitoring?  Usually, you can at least check the CPU and
> system
> temperatures from within the BIOS.  The motherboard may have come with
> some
> software that lets you monitor things like temperatures and fan speeds
> from
> within Windows, as well.
>
> I was thinking that since your video card is probably passively cooled, it
> might be sensitive to heat build up witin the case.  A quick and dirty
> test
> would be to take the side off your case and use a house fan to blow some
> air
> in there, in order to see if this makes any difference.
>
> With 256mb of RAM and WinXP, I guessing you are needing to make a fair
> amount of use of your swap file to play games, but I'm not sure that's
> relevant to the problem you've described.
>
> John Sproule
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Martin Mccabe" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 11:50 PM
> Subject: [PCBUILD] winXP
>
>
>> dunno if this belong here but problem is
>> asrock K7S8X, athlon XP+2800, 256meg ram, x2 80gig maxtor HD's, geforce
>> fx5200
>> windows XP home (OEM)
>> OK hear I go; clean install of XP on new hard drive seems to be working
>> fine but system locks when trying to play certain games ie all age of
>> empires and derivatives and all westwood command and conquer even back to
>> dune 2000. all install fine and will start but within a min. or two lock
>> up
>
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