HELP!!! my pc crashes when idle???

[ari666]

hi hi hi

i have just put together a new pc from bits and pieces, but the problem is that when the computer has nothing to do it freezes.... its really annoying. if i leave it for about twenty minutes...BAM....its frozen.

the weird thing is that you can play counter strike source in 1024x768 getting over 100 frames per second, for as long as you like.... i was playing it for most of the day yesterday, the only breaks to eat and pee, and it didnt even flinch. but when i shut all apllications down, and leave it on desktop. it freezes and needs a restart.

something like this:
asus P4800-se mainboard
intel pentium 4 2.8 gig (no hyper threading)
500 meg ram (2 256 sticks of matched samsung ram 3200)
maxtor 80 gig sata hdd
sound blaster audigy (internal rack mounting fits in the 5 1/4 bay)
at the moment in has a radeon 6800 pro hercules in it, but it has had various graphice cards and it has made no difference.
granted, that my psu is a bit crap, it is a 350w jobbie that is p4 ready, running 18a on the 12v rail. so should be ok. (i am gonna change it soonish anyway)


any ideas guys?
please help.

 

[Eleventeen]

My computer was doing that too, but it had to do with my modem for dialup. I could play games as much as I wanted and when i let it idle it froze. I replaced the modem, and everything worked fine. Your not on dialup, are you?

 

[DonNagual]

Try disabling your screensaver and see if that fixes you up.

 

[ari666]

no to the dial up question, but i think i might look into the software of the lan card... it had a few issues when i built it, and you just reminded me.

screen saver is disabled already, i hate screen savers.

cheers guys

 

[DelJo63]

check HD free space and don't let the machine go into HIBERNATION

 

[ari666]

thats a good point. i put a stupidly small partition on the hard disk purely for xp, but 10 gig is too small because it is telling me to free up disk space.

cheers dude, i will try a format to get rid of the tiny partition and let you guys know.

 

[SOcRatEs]

Howdy

check HD free space and don't let the machine go into HIBERNATION

This makes the most sense.

They hide the feartures for Hyber on the screen saver page.
Also check sys restore for how much HDD space it's stealing.
A second hdd could help here too. Putting the pagefile on a drive
other than the one windows is installed to, not just a partition
on the same drive as windows.
G'Luck