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hello hello and happy holidays. unfortunately my computer has decided to give me a headache today - merry christmas to me.

Several weeks ago my computer started both crashing (complete instantaneous power off when playing games) and freezing (100% lockup, whatever sound was playing at the time continues to play repeatedly and rapidly and no chance of getting to task manager when using tv tuner). Games (civilization 4, quake 4, unreal tournament 2004, etc.) crash after about 20-40 seconds after loading and the tv tuner lasts usually between 5 and 20 mins before locking up. These problems started out of the blue, not after installing ANYTHING for about 2 weeks prior. Windows would not let me do a system restore to any past dates.

Over the xmas holidays I finally found time to really look at it. I have uninstalled/reinstalled my video drivers (using several catalyst versions) with no luck. I formatted today thinking for sure this would fix the problem but it didn't, whichs means this is probably a very expensive hardware problem. Although this sounds like a textbook case of overheating, heat readings are well within normal range (50c for CPU, 33 for mobo). I've ruled out the video card and ram by replacing both of those. My suspicions now lie with my power supply (voltage readings from the program 'speedfan' are way low for -12 and -5 volts (-16.97 and -8.78 volts respectively) but according to the program's faq's this happens sometimes and doesn't necessarily indicate a problem, however i'm still wondering. I am also thinking this is a motherboard or MAYBE hard drive problem.

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on what it could be. I want to zone out over my holiday break and play some games!!!

Thanks everyone

Specs:
AMD Athlon 2600+
500W power supply
Western Digital 74gb 10k rpm SATA hard drive
2 sticks 512 mb DDR 3200
ATI Radeon 9800
ATI tv wonder pro
no-name pci sound card
windows xp professional service pack 2
1 cd burner, 1 dvd burner
2x ide hard drives (in addition to the sata)

Hello

I would switch from the tv tuner to the ati card. TV tuners arent always used for games playing unless your using a console like an xbox or ps2. How many fans do you have in your system? It could be a cooling problem i would guess.

this is all the advice i can give you

sw123

Have you tried moving the TV card to another PCI slot?