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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