PC Crashing

[soulzack]

Hey everyone. 2 months ago i bought all the parts for a new PC and put it all together. I installed XP Sp3. straight away i had problems. for one my onboard sound card wouldnt be detected at all and 90% of the games i tried on it crashed. the shop i bought it from (which is called Falcons) is terrible and couldnt even admit they couldnt fix the problem.

I now have Windows Vists Buisness installed and the only game out of about 11 games ive played on it that hasnt crashed is Call of Duty 4. other games ive tried include Crysis, Oblivion and Lord of the Rings battle for middle earth 2.

a couple of times CoD4 has lagged and recovered. when i closed the game Windows had a message on the screen saying the display driver had crashed but had been recovered. Ive tried updating the display driver but it then crashed on CoD4 aswell.

here is the list of my PC hardware:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz

Memory: 2046MB RAM

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

Sound Card: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)

Operating System: Windows Vista? Business (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1 (6001.longhorn_rtm.080118-1840)


thankyou for any help

 

[law9933]

Power supply's brand & wattage?

 

[soulzack]

ATX 450 WATT POWER SUPPLY

Edit: i just thought i should put more info on the crashes. when im playing the game the screen freezes and the sound goes weird and seems to replay the last second of sound over and over again untill it stops then the PC wont do anything till i reset the PC. even the Num lock on the keyboard will not switch on/off when the game crashes. there is no blue screen even though i do have it turned on and no error reports that i can find.

 

[Billb2]

Event Viewer say anything?

 

[soulzack]

had a look at event view but couldnt really make sense of most of it. never used it before

 

[Billb2]

On the system tab anything marked with a red error is a problem.
Right click the error line, choose properties for an explaination. If that doesn't help you understand, click the link on the properties popup answer yes in the next box and you'll get an easier to understand explaination from Microsoft.