Ok, I am about at my wits end...

Hello everyone. To warn everyone up front, I am about at a intermediate knowledge level of computers, so I am doing the best I have with the information I got. But here is my problem:

I have (in my own humble opinion) a pretty decent computer. Some may disagree, but it is most ceartinly powerful enough to run games like BioShock and Crysis at full resolution and very smoothly.

So, imgaine my frustration when I go to my local Best Buy and pick up the Orange Box and Far Cry at a discount, bring it home, only to find the games crash almost immediatly after starting. These games are four years old and no where near the graphics complexity of todays games, and yet they crash and restart my computer.

As best as I can remember, these are my specs:
Gateway GT5056 w/ AMD Athalon Dual core processor
NVIDIA GeForce 9600
2GB Ram
plenty of hard drive space

With both games, I start up, and get past the opening screen. The game loads fine, starts up ok, runs the introductory sequences just fine. Then when the actual gameplay starts, I go about 5 or 10 minutes and the game crashes. Whatever sound was playing starts skipping and repeating and the screen goes black. My monitor says, "no signal", and then after 30 seconds or so my PC restarts. Frustrating to say the least.

They crash usually in the same place, but not always. Usually HL:2 crashed right after I got off the train at sector 17. But after I decided to try downloading the game from the steam server, I made it all the way to ravenholm before it crashed. CS: Source just craps out anytime it likes. And FarCry seems to crap out right after the first shack outside of the cave as soon as I jump in the water to go to the next island.

After having HL2 and CS:S crash on me, I figured it was a Steam problem or a error with the disk. But somehow I managed to play through Episode 1 and 2 with no errors whatsoever. And then when Far Cry also crashed with the exact same problem, I figured it was a driver problem of some sort.

Here are some things I have done to fix it, but no success:

Uninstall and re-install both games.
Update graphics drivers
Rolled back graphics drivers
Defragmented and virus scanned my whole computer
Forced the games to run in Direct X8 instead of 9.0c.
Lowered resolution on both games.
Backed up and wiped my whole computer, and re-installed all my drivers and cards.

...and prayed.

If your wondering why I am so gung ho, I just dont want any issues with future games.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Help would be much appreciated.

*bump*

anyone?

Your specs list is deficient.

That is why they have a specs list in your profile.

Anyway, try disabling sound in Bios if onboard.

Have you installed the latest motherboard and video card drivers? I had alot of problems with Far Cry crashing and freezing until about a year after the game came out and a new video card driver finally fixed it.