£350 down the toilet?

[Simon_Gold]

Having some major problems with my graphics card. My PC is running fine except when I come to play games (Which is the main reason I built it). For some time after I built it, whilst playing a game, it would either just crash back to the desktop or restart after a few seconds to a couple of minutes of gameplay(tried with numerous types of games). I somehow managed to resolve this problem by doing a clean boot-up and turning up my CPU fan speed(thinking it may have been overheating). Everything was running fine until I installed Rome Total War the other day...and the problem came back! It loads the game past the opening video then crashes saying "Windows has detected and recovered from a device failure" and cuts back to a low-res desktop and I have to reboot. After scan-disk has run, Windows sometimes says something along the lines of "Display driver was unable to complete a drawing operation". When loading Max Payne 2 the game simply either restarts or cuts back to desktop (I checked in Task Manager and it isn't still running). What's going on?!?! Given that it ran fine for a couple of weeks and I played lots of games at high-res etc without any problems I don't imagine its a hardware issue. I have all the latest drivers and there's never been a different graphics card in the machine. Here's a point, I am running XP Home with Service Pack 1 but not 2. I also have an AVerTV media card which I can't seem to install and it says when I boot up "AVerSA.exe has encountered a problem and has had to be closed". I JUST WANT TO PLAY SOME GAMES!!!!!

Sorry this was such a long post and any help would be GREATLY appreciated....

Spec: AMD XP3000, 1Gb Ram, GPU as above, XPHome SP1,

 

[Simon_Gold]

Haha! After months of taking this PC to pieces, formatting the hard drive, updating drivers etc etc etc.....I went on MSI.COM just to check out whether updating my BIOS would help....I typed in my motherboard name and one version of the BIOS upgrade said "Fixes the following problems: Compatability issue with FX5900 Ultra graphics card"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Could this be the solution finally?!?!?!? Just can't wait to get home from work to update it!

p.s. If this doesn't work I'll put my PC in the middle of a busy road and watch some truck smash the heap of shi............

 

[Ea$Y]

LOL

If it aint working right after 2 months break it and try it again .
Yeah the msi bios flash update will definatly fix the prob.
Id rather get bamboo shoots shoved under my fingernails then flash a bios lol.
Try updating your mobo agp driver and northbridge/southbridge drivers as well
also try updating to the newest v. of direct X that resolves a lot of vid/sound related problems.
Once you get everything sorted if you have xp pro create a hardware profile/ set a restore point . In case something messes up in the future.

Good luck

Cheers