Hi Guys. Sorry to be a bother, but alas, my gaming has slowed to a near halt; and, being the paranoid person i am, my concern is growing. short version: my PC keeps crashing when i play 3d games, and i don't know why. long version: back in november i commissioned help to build an economy gaming PC. I didn't have a lot of pocket change but i had enough for a decent PC. Add on Christmas and i have a fairly good gaming PC, at least one that can play most of the latest games, and a 24 inch monitor. The rest, as they say, is history. Or it was, until a few weeks ago, when a strange error message appeared on my screen: "Microsoft Windows has stopped working" Uh-oh. Has it now? But to my surprise, nothing happened, except when i closed it out it would pop up again. I was worried, but left it alone, because i figured it did not seem to be doing any harm. After a while, Windows noticed this problem and fixed it. Huzzah, thought I. Unfortunately, whenever my computer goes off and on, the message returns until Windows gets it's act together and fixes it. Anyway, since then, when i run certain 3d games, my computer seems to crash, courtesy of the blue screen of death. I believe it may be a problem of overheating, but it doesn't simply crash when i play Dead Space or Mirror's Edge. It seems to also not like Psychonauts, though it runs the latter much longer before crashing. Anyway, that being said, i just wanted to make sure it was a problem with cooling, and what the hell the error message is, and ways i could fix the problem with the lowest cost. Things to remember: The error message, after doing some research, seems to be a less-than-common problem with the vista sidebar, which i never use. My copy of Vista is a cracked copy, and many of my games are also cracked. I doubt this has anything to do with it, but better safe then sorry. Also, the problem seemed to arise after the installation of World of Warcraft. my specs, if you need them: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Duel Core 5800+ 3.0 ghz 5.00 gigs RAM NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT Video Card. 1gbt. 700 Watt power supply Any help is greatly appreciated! Don't let such great games go to waste! Anyways, thanks for the help, in advance. ~Ryan.

if anyone needs any more information, or would like to take me out for a nice seafood dinner, feel free to ask.

Gosh, can I assume you to be 20ish tall blond and well.... Sorry, you goota buy a good copy of the OS and games for support tickets. don't care how good you look. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

*shakes fist in a fury of rage and ruin at the heavens* thanks, anyway. Off i go.