I'm thinking that it might be a memory slot issue. Where you stick the memory sticks in, or it could be the memory sticks themselves getting "****" .

I moved 1 of mine lately and that's when my problems started. I couldn't even start my computer.


A long beep from the speaker on fixed periods and I would have to shut it down.

For me it seems it was a memory slot being corrupted. I moved my sticks and now it's working perfectly.

Hope this helps some of you.

I also have a corrupt pci slot on my mobo, such hardware errors. Well at least it's not the agp slot

hrmm, well i'm not sure if this may help at all, but anyways i had a similar problem, turned out for me it was the sound card, i've this problem only with creative labs sound blaster cards (which i used to swear by) the 2 times i've had this problem

first on a PIII 800 ( a while ago) a neat little intel board, with soundblaster card built in, when i disabled that card and put in pci sound card, never had a trouble with the rebooting since.

seconding i had the trouble on a P4 2.8
i had a Soundblaster Live 5.1 card, games would seem to randomly close or the computer would restart for no reason, after taking out the Live card and enabling the onboard sound in the computer (which had better hardware support for games surprisingly!) i never had the troubleagain

i realise this is a bit of a different problem than the original post had, but it may help for others, if you have a soudn card try taking it out, or disable the onboard one? hope it helps

Hey everyone, I'm new to the site, and was browsing the internet for solutions to my problem, and I landed here but didn't really find a solid answer. So I figured I may as well ask directly to a group of people.
My problem is similiar to the problems already mentioned on this forum. So ill explain my problem.

I just recently was given a computer from a friend as he bougt an upgrade, and we reformatted this computer. Totally wiping it clean, and then following naturally downloading all the drivers to make the computer properly functional. The basic specs of my computer are :
Windows XP Professional
1.92 GHz
1.50 GB of RAM
Main hard drive has 93.3 GIGS.. 67.2 Free.
Radeon X1650 Series (Can be found ati [dot]amd[dot]com/support/driver[dot]html)
Now before the computer was reformated and was still in my friends room, both games were perfectly functional on this computer. The games are F.E.A.R and Oblivion: Elder Scrolls IV. Both worked perfectly on the computer no problems.
However after taking the computer home and installing the two games, I started with F.E.A.R, I popped in the disk. The main menu popped up after the introductory company promo's and I proceeded to making a new game. The game started and I watched the first bit of the movie, up until the movie reached the name of the game, as soon as it got there, my computer would automatically restart. Simply shut off, and restart. At first I was shocked as, I had never seen the game react in such a way. However the problem proceeded, and still shuts down on that same spot. I gave up on that after a couple days of research and no real solid answer, I switched the restart to the 'Physical Memory Dumping' screen, also known as (The Blue Screen of Death). The information I received from that screen is as follows:
XXX STOP: 0x0000008E (0x000001D,0xe345CF97,0xA8F168C8,0x00000000)

After giving up on FEAR. I figured it was just my game, so I threw in Oblivion and loaded up the game, began as usual. Everything was working great, made my character, and for any of those who knows the game, the beginning level is underneath the castle. Well I played the whole "first level" of the game, no problems everything was running smoothly, however what seemed to be good soon became bad. As I was ending the first section of the game (leaving the tunnels to outside) the loading screen popped up, it loaded the whole thing, and as soon as it finished the same problem occurred. My computer went to the blue screen. I tried the same thing a few times, to see if it was just fluke, but every time my computer restarts. I have noticed however, the level will load, and I can keep it there, but as soon as I touch the mouse or the keyboard the computer restarts.

I am totally stumped on this issue, I have no idea, what is wrong. I can only think that something is wrong with the graphics card or the driver. I downloaded two different things regarding the driver, off the site listed above. Both are drivers, and after uninstalling one and trying another, both installed correctly but the problem was still there in the games. The problem has not occurred randomly just browsing the internet or using Photoshop, just when I load these two games.

Any help would be useful, thanks for your time!