Hey,
I found this forum while Googling solutions for my problem, and figured I'll post it here.
This started some months ago, and didn't happen as frequently. At the time, my computer would lock up after (usually long) gaming sessions (City of Villains at the time). The picture would freeze, the sound stop, the cursor not moveable, and the only thing to do was to hit the reset button. It wouldn't happen much though, so I just disregarded it.
After a while, I added a stick of RAM to my computer (added a 512 MB one to two 256s), and that's when I could no longer ignore the problem. Not only did it become much more frequent in games (World of Warcraft at the time), it also started happening while doing things with a lighter load on the system like surfing the web, chatting on mIRC, etc.
Interestingly, after I boot up the computer in the morning (I usually turn it off at night), it almost always freezes just before the Windows XP welcome screen (the screen is black when it freezes). Sometimes it would freeze soon after the second boot. Other than that I can't reproduce the problem. It could happen after two minutes of gaming (which is usually the case), or after an hour, or even a few hours (although that's quite rare).
As for my specs: Windows XP Professional, ATI Radeon 9600 (128 MB), 768 MB of RAM (a friend of mine who's more proficient with computers took one out for testing), Intel Pentium 4, CPU 1.6 GHZ.
Also, I'm a bit (well, a lot) of a computer newbie, so please go easy on the lingo and such =)
Thanks,
Eyal
I found this forum while Googling solutions for my problem, and figured I'll post it here.
This started some months ago, and didn't happen as frequently. At the time, my computer would lock up after (usually long) gaming sessions (City of Villains at the time). The picture would freeze, the sound stop, the cursor not moveable, and the only thing to do was to hit the reset button. It wouldn't happen much though, so I just disregarded it.
After a while, I added a stick of RAM to my computer (added a 512 MB one to two 256s), and that's when I could no longer ignore the problem. Not only did it become much more frequent in games (World of Warcraft at the time), it also started happening while doing things with a lighter load on the system like surfing the web, chatting on mIRC, etc.
Interestingly, after I boot up the computer in the morning (I usually turn it off at night), it almost always freezes just before the Windows XP welcome screen (the screen is black when it freezes). Sometimes it would freeze soon after the second boot. Other than that I can't reproduce the problem. It could happen after two minutes of gaming (which is usually the case), or after an hour, or even a few hours (although that's quite rare).
As for my specs: Windows XP Professional, ATI Radeon 9600 (128 MB), 768 MB of RAM (a friend of mine who's more proficient with computers took one out for testing), Intel Pentium 4, CPU 1.6 GHZ.
Also, I'm a bit (well, a lot) of a computer newbie, so please go easy on the lingo and such =)
Thanks,
Eyal
