Hello, and thank you in advance for your time in reading this post. I apologize if I posted this in the wrong forum.
It's a little long, but I'll be specific as possible.
A little back-story on this computer—
I bought it recently (October of '09) and it's has had a couple of problems beforehand. The first one occurred a couple of months ago when it was overheating. When I went to get it looked, the repairman diagnosed it incorrectly as a video card failure (it was just the fan.) In the end, he replaced my good video card with a horrible shoddy one I had to get replaced. In doing so, I bought a nVidia 9800 GT card, but my computer's power supply was too low (350w or so, if I remember right), so I bought a 500(or 550?) watt one to help compensate. Everything was working fine then.
Recently, it blue-screened on me one morning when I turned it on, and it wouldn't turn on again at all. (Not sure if this is related or not, but it happened the morning after my family replaced our home router because the old one died. The new one has been giving me a very hard time getting online, but I don't think it has anything to do with this...)
Anyway, when I went to get it repaired again (at a different place), the guy there told me that it was a video card issue (again), and replaced by 9800 GT card with a 9500 GT one of the same maker.
When I got home, it would constantly blue-screen on me after 10-15 minutes of use, so the repairman (Joe) told me to just leave it off for the night and see if it fixes itself in the morning, which it did.
That's the back-story up until now.
Now I'm having an issue that the computer freezes randomly when I'm playing a game (League of Legends, to be exact, but I think it would do that for any game.) To give you an idea (for those who don't know), a typical match in Leagues is about 35-45 minutes. When I say "randomly," it'll freeze sometimes 2-5 times during a single match, or none at all. When it does happen, the computer either loops the audio for a few moments, then freezes entirely, forcing me to hard reset it via power button, or it fixes itself after 10-15 seconds with some messed-up graphics (grass becomes complete patches of black, and so on) that fixes itself if I alt-tab in and out of it.
I'm also having a problem when watching live stream videos (like on JustinTV, not Youtube) that causes the video to "spike" (the image itself freezes, then catches up in a few minutes) but the audio is completely fine. I think this might be related to the freezing as well.
A bit about the computer itself:
Motherboard: ASUSTeK (M3A76-CM)
CPU: AMD Athlon™ II X2 245 Processor
RAM: don't know the make/model of it, but I never replaced it. About 3.25GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (like I mentioned, I've gone through 3-4 different video cards since I got the computer last year)
PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W
It's a little long, but I'll be specific as possible.
A little back-story on this computer—
I bought it recently (October of '09) and it's has had a couple of problems beforehand. The first one occurred a couple of months ago when it was overheating. When I went to get it looked, the repairman diagnosed it incorrectly as a video card failure (it was just the fan.) In the end, he replaced my good video card with a horrible shoddy one I had to get replaced. In doing so, I bought a nVidia 9800 GT card, but my computer's power supply was too low (350w or so, if I remember right), so I bought a 500(or 550?) watt one to help compensate. Everything was working fine then.
Recently, it blue-screened on me one morning when I turned it on, and it wouldn't turn on again at all. (Not sure if this is related or not, but it happened the morning after my family replaced our home router because the old one died. The new one has been giving me a very hard time getting online, but I don't think it has anything to do with this...)
Anyway, when I went to get it repaired again (at a different place), the guy there told me that it was a video card issue (again), and replaced by 9800 GT card with a 9500 GT one of the same maker.
When I got home, it would constantly blue-screen on me after 10-15 minutes of use, so the repairman (Joe) told me to just leave it off for the night and see if it fixes itself in the morning, which it did.
That's the back-story up until now.
Now I'm having an issue that the computer freezes randomly when I'm playing a game (League of Legends, to be exact, but I think it would do that for any game.) To give you an idea (for those who don't know), a typical match in Leagues is about 35-45 minutes. When I say "randomly," it'll freeze sometimes 2-5 times during a single match, or none at all. When it does happen, the computer either loops the audio for a few moments, then freezes entirely, forcing me to hard reset it via power button, or it fixes itself after 10-15 seconds with some messed-up graphics (grass becomes complete patches of black, and so on) that fixes itself if I alt-tab in and out of it.
I'm also having a problem when watching live stream videos (like on JustinTV, not Youtube) that causes the video to "spike" (the image itself freezes, then catches up in a few minutes) but the audio is completely fine. I think this might be related to the freezing as well.
A bit about the computer itself:
Motherboard: ASUSTeK (M3A76-CM)
CPU: AMD Athlon™ II X2 245 Processor
RAM: don't know the make/model of it, but I never replaced it. About 3.25GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (like I mentioned, I've gone through 3-4 different video cards since I got the computer last year)
PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W
