hello, i have a homebuilt system, consists of a Asus p4t-e motherboard with a P4 2.0 chip, over a gig of RAM, a Nvidia Geforce 3 TI 500 graphics card, WD 120 gig harddrive, Audigy soundcard, a Viewsonic A90f monitor, and some really crappy speakers. yea, I ran outta credit ;) My problem started 3 weeks ago, I play Anarchy Online, and i started to have a small graphical error along with my computer freezing for 20-30 seconds every 3 minutes, and the freezing would get faster and for longer periods of time. the small graphical error was pixels changing color all over the screen, at first i thought it was snowing or something. i put on Quake 3 arena, to see if that game would freeze up too, ya know, see if the problem is the graphics card, but for the 1st week, the game ran fine, then started to freeze up like AO was doing. Since then, I've Reformatted my harddrive, repartioned a bit better, reinstalled Xp, got service pack 1 <cough cough> upgraded my drivers, along with directx 9b, and all that at once, reinstalled AO after all that, and it froze up even quicker. Driving me nutty now, but i notice the game doesnt freeze up my system when the game is minimized, but not like i can play that way. Any advice/solutions is Greatly appreciated.

this sounds heat related to me - do you have any realtime temp monitoring for your cpu? If not, play AO until you start getting the artifacting you describe, then reboot and check cpu temp in your bios. If it's around 60 celsius or higher you need a better heatsink/fan or some more case fans.

Where do i find the Real time Temperature monitoring? Beyond the bios, i mean, I looked around, seen some messages where they seem to be using a program like that. Thanks for the advice.

Normally you get some little windows app with your motherboard, for example with MSI boards you get something called PCAlert which runs in the system tray. Check the CD which came with your mobo. Did you find the temp reading in the BIOS though? If so, how high was it?