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Here's my system:

Windows XP 32x SP2
Asus A8N-e NF4 SKT 939
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
4x 512 Corsair RAM
ATI X550 256MB PCI-E

I was digging for my Risk 2 CD and found it to play some obvious Risk.

I thought I might have problems running it in XP because it is an older 2D game but gave it a try.

Everything went fine and I got into the game menu and made my way to the actual gameplay.

My computer shuts down and usually restarts with no notice after playing the game content after about 1-3 minutes. I'm very confused as this software can't be very demanding on my hardware.

But I have encountered problems with other games as the latest Morrowind would freeze up also during gameplay.

This makes me very depressed that I cannot enjoy my computer as I just bought it in nov. 05' to enjoy playing WoW with my friends. WoW played good with my system with the sacrifice of having a poor video card I had to keep my detail low to obtain decent FPS; but in general the game never locked up or froze even in that emersive 3D environment.

As far as those problems I do experience a really annoying issue while trying to freshly install OS's. When it is done loading drivers I have about 5 seconds to choose all my options before it starts to copy files or my computer will just shutdown! But if I work fast enough and get it into the part of copying files to the system is stays stable.

Every time I talk to the person I purchased my system from which has a 2 year warr. on everything, he just tells me to do the most common counters as cleaning out the fans and cooling units etc.. I maintain my computer very much so in that way and know that's not my problem.

Another this is my ram doesn't come up as 400DDR on startup which is it, rather it posts 333 when set in auto in bios. The problem with this is though when i set it manually there are alot of options I am unaware of: I assume using auto features is the best way to go so I leave everything on default and still encounter issues.

1. Could it be one stick of bad ram? What's the way of diognosing bad ram?
2. Did they not properly place my CPU?
3. Is my CPU getting to hot? I have read that my CPU does maintain a high temperature, but it honestly idles at 69-79'c which seems rediculous.

or what else could it be?

Thanks guys, love to hear some input.

Read this thread by Howard then zip up a few minidumps in one zip file and attach them to this thread.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic51365.html