Kinda pertains to gaming

[bombatomba]

My Dell8300 has been locking up during gameplay, but not with every game. Half-life 2, World of Warcraft, even the Civ 4 demo cause a hard lock. I keep my PC very clean (from adware, viruses, etc) what am I doing wrong? It's been going on (and off) for about year now.

[danzil]

update your graphics card driver. and direct x

also check for windows updates etc. do routine maintenance like a defrag etc.

when it locks up does it just freeze or do you get errors.or any blue screening.

regards

danzil

[bombatomba]

Did both recently (dx & newest nVidia), do defrag about once a month, depending on amount of installations. It does a hard lock. Kinda sucks because I'm afraid its the power supply (stock) and since it's a dell...

 

Wierd that it only locks in some games, like Half-Life 2, WoW, and Civ 4 Demo, but not Dawn of War or X3: Reunion.

[danzil]

do you still have the stock card installed i thought it was an ati card installed.

could be a fault in the card, mainly the ram.

is it under warrenty. do games play at full res, with a decent frame rate.

regards

danzil

[bombatomba]

Stock card was for my rig is a Geforce 5500. A year or so ago I shoehorned in an PNY geforce 6600. Is there any way to test the memory on a videocard? (like memtest86?)

 

I can play Wow, but only at severly reduced settings (turn everything down, run in window). Most games I run at 1024x768, Half-life 2 runs descent, at about 40 - 60 fps at about high settings (not hdr). I should reinstall HL2 and run it at low settings to see if I get similar results as with WoW.

 

I guess what sucks is for a long time I ran HL2 and WoW at max settings with no difficulties, I only had problems after uninstalling them and then reinstalling them a few months later.