[Rab]

I have had my custom built pc for about 3 yrs but recently it has been freezing whenever I boot up a game for 15 seconds or even just browsing with a couple windows open in about 5 minutes.

My first thought was that something was overheating in the case, so i took the door off and stuck a fan in the door; didn't help at all.

I then thought it was my video card so i uninstalled my vid card drivers and switched my vid cards (from the R9800pro to a Ti4200, just for fun) and that didn't work. I put my R9800 back in and switched drivers to the latest from ATI's website and that didn't work.

I'm not clueless to PC's by any means but I'm a little stumped by this one.

(I also doubted problems like the PSU not being powerful enough or anything like that, because i ran the PC fine for over 2 years)

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

I also thought my GPU fan died but then the ti4200 would have worked.

I would just reformat but I don't have my OS discs anymore, if all else fails I can try to obtain them

[philthomas]

If you have more than one memory stick, try removing one and run with just one, if no better swap them around, still using just one and see if this resolves it.

Or if you have the luxury of spare RAM available try using that.

[Rab]

Yeah...I tried to swap the RAM around and it didn't do anything; I may have to just bite the bullet and go buy XP discs and reformat...

[Rab]

Well i managed to get my hand on Windows XP and I reformatted but it doesn't appear to have helped my problem much. It doesn't crash as in black out my monitor, but when I open any sort of PC game, it crashes just a few seconds in and sometimes I'm not even able to close it w/ task manager half the time. I'm really confused right now.

[Krlll]

I have to agree with philthomas.You have pretty much ruled most things out.Make a bootable ISO of Memtest86 and fully test the memory to make sure that is not the fault