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About 3 or 4 day's ago, while my roommate was playing a game on my computer that I had played plenty before, randomly hard froze. After rebooting and trying the game again, the same thing happened within a few minutes. I suggested to try a different game, and 2 game later I gathered that it wasn't something wrong with the games, it was my computer.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro 32-bit, Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 8400GS Video card...

Gothic 3, and then Homefront(which was a new addition to my collection), and then Bioshock... Gothic 3 and Bioshock never had any problems before, but it seems like it's gonna do it sometime randomly during ANY game I try and play. Even windows Solitare is kind of glitchy

.. I have no idea what prompted this issue, or how to fix it, since I don't really know what's wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated

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  • Tell us the name of the game...
    – Jet
    Sep 22, 2013 at 13:53
  • Gothic 3, and then Homefront(which was a new addition to my collection), and then Bioshock... Gothis 3 and Bioshock never had any problems before, but it seems like it's gonna do it sometime randomly during ANY game I try and play. Even windows Solitare is kind of glitchy...
    – Skatr
    Sep 22, 2013 at 14:00
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    This is a tough one because there are several possibilities. Any other info you have might help. OS version, hardware specs, etc. Are these fairly modern games with intense graphics? Might be something wrong with cooling of CPU or gpu. Might also just be faulty CPU gpu or ram. Try running a memtest for an hour or two to rule that out. Sep 22, 2013 at 14:04
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    @skatr memtest86.com/download.htm burn iso as a bootable cd and let it run for a few hours. If it reports any errors you have a bad stick/set. Or win7 has a built-in one that's not as thorough but worth a try for starters. Sep 22, 2013 at 17:25
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    It's supposed to boot from the cd. You can use a usb drive but I don't think you can boot a virtual drive. Needs to run without the os behind it. Sep 22, 2013 at 22:44

1 Answer 1

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The problem is probably in overheating of CPU or videocard.

Check fans of your processor and videocard, and remove dust.
When there is dust, they can't do their job. And then the hardware overheats and computer stops working. And the results are - freezing / restarting / BSOD.

To check the temperatures and fan speeds , use tools like Open Hardware Monitor , AIDA64 or smtg else. You can also see temperatures and speeds in BIOS settings (mostly in newer versions of BIOS).

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  • what temperature is it supposed to run at? I'm at 65c to 68c... I don't know if that's good or bad...
    – Skatr
    Sep 22, 2013 at 14:58
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    That's fine but check under heavy load like in a game. 90-100 is around max for most cards. Talking about gpu not CPU here. Sep 22, 2013 at 17:26
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    @Neil Neyman , 65-68 is fine o_O? The normal is somewhere under 55C. Most hardware's maximal allowed temperature is 70C. If its >70 then you'll probably see decrease of performance, or BSOD.
    – Jet
    Sep 22, 2013 at 17:52
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    @jet referring to 8400gs not CPU. Yes that's ok. Sep 22, 2013 at 18:15

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