Regular Crashes

[SteveP40]

I have an older buisness computer with a 450 mhz AMD processor, an Audigy ZS, sound card, and NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000 video card. When playing games that should play easily, (the specs for the game are far below the specs of the computer) the game is sometimes choppy. If I turn on video acceleration the computer spontaneously reboots in Windows 2000, the game crashes in Windows ME. All drivers are updated, and as long as I don't do anything requiring any muscle, I'll be fine. Otherwise lockups, and crashes seem to be the norm. I suspect the power supply because I know it is rather small. Only about 125 watts. I guess I am just looking for confermation before jumping to conclusions. Is there anything else it COULD be?
Thanks in advance,
Steve

 

[iamfried]

My thinking is that you may be under powered. I remember that I had a celeron 300 overclocked to 450 (much like the rest of anandtech) and I had a 300 W power supply.

Thing is, whenever my computer crashes due to heavy lifting, it is a temperature thing. Could be that you need to clean out your computer case (seeing how this computer sounds to be > 4 years old), blow out the heatsink fan, and just make sure all the dirt is out of there which could be affecting cooling.

If you have some kind of temperature monitoring software too, that would be helpful in determining if this is the problem.

 

[SteveP40]

Definately not a temp problem. Will do it immediately on the effort even if just fired up. Also I have already blown all the dust out recently.
Thanks for the quick reply.
Steve