Games shut down by themselves!

[gnich]

My son has a computer that I put together about a year ago. It has an AMD Athlon Slot A - 900 mh Thunderbird processor . He uses it to do instant messaging and a little word processing etc. He also likes to play some games on it. But most of the games have started shutting down of themselves. It does not go blue screen, just shuts down clean and goes back to the desktop. He used to be able to play Wolfenstein on his old PII 400 mh with no problems. But now with this 900 mh computer he cannot play it at all. It even shuts down when playing SIMS which should be taking little CPU usage. I don't know whether to call it a hardware or a software problem. I just installed DirectX 9 to see if that would help. It didn't. Got any ideas?

[Bink]

Update all possible drivers, such as soundcard, video card, motherboard chipset, network card, etc etc...

Apply the latest available BIOS update for the motherboard and any service packs for Windows that haven't been installed.

If problems still persist, try swapping the RAM with some you know works fine. If still no go, do the same with other components such as video card, CPU, etc.

[Andy_83]

Try going into the graphics settings for direct X, and unchecking the box for 'enable fog table emulation'

I don't know the theory behind this but it's worked for me before.

[Candyman]

Sounds like a possible ram problem. Make sure the ram is seated correctly, and if possible, check each stick by removing or replacing, and try the games then. I had problems like this and it was my ddr stick of 256 causing the problem.

[gnich]

It turns out that it was a ram problem. I had in a 128 mb stick and a 256 mb stick. The 128 mb stick was bad. It was as simple as that.