To make a long story short, after clean installing XP,many of today's newer games often freeze up out of nowhere and I have to reboot. I have found that this problem mainly occurs in the various really new games, mainy of which are using DirectX 9, such as Splinter Cell, Raven Shield, and Unreal II. I had been playing slightly older games like Ghost Recon and Medal of Honor (both of which are very 3D resource reliant) but did not get this random freeze up...yet. I did,however, have this happen to me when playing a significantly older game, Unreal (which is about 4 years old). In any case, I am running an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, with the latest drivers. I can only surmise that perhaps my machine is overheating? I decided to take off the side of the case and even vacumed out the insides,too, to make sure the fans were spinning optimally. I have not encountered this problem at all outside of playing 3D games. Does Windows XP not function well with ATI cards? Because I have also gotten several "video card draw" error messages,simply while just idling around. In any case, if anyone has any insight and/or solutions to my problem,it would be much appreciated.

I had a 1.3 in a abit board a couple of weeks ago that was freezing and was driving me nuts. I tried everything. I underclocked this pc and it has not frozen since. It was not overclocked and should have run at what it was set at but it wouldnt. Just my experiance here for what its worth.

I have a ATI Saphire 8500LE with 512 MEG DDR ram, and my son play all his games fine, he plays Splinter Cell for hours. I also have an AMD T-Bird 1.3 GHz proc. I used to have a problem like yours with 3D computer games until I tested my RAM, and found it was bad. I replaced it and no more problems since. your local computer shop, or maybe even Best Buy, would probably test your RAM stick for free.

I have had this problem for ages, I have had my ram tested many times and it is fine,although I haven't tried underclocking yet. At the moment it is giving me real hell with Vietcong. I think it has more to do with XP in it's infinite shoddyness than anything else. Win98 may have been dodgier but at least it was stable when you wanted to play a game, I think I may go back to Win 2000 soon if this keeps up, a lot of people have told me that it is much more stable...