Strange XP Crashes

Hopefully somone here will be able to help me this as its really starting to bug me. I have just built a new system and installed XP Pro and everthing runs fine in XP except for when I run games. As soon as I got into any games (RTCW for example) they will run for about 5 minutes and then hang and bomb back to the desktop. All my applications will run fine for ever and a day except that yesterday the spooler service crashed for no reason. The specs for my system are:-

MSI KT3-Ultra ARU Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1800
Coolmaster Heatsink (cant remember model). System runs at 55c when in games
512Mb DDR PC2700 Ram
80Gb IBM Deskstar IDE HDD
128Mb MSI TI-4400 GeForce 4 Graphics Card
32x Freecom CD-RW
Memorex 16x DVD

I have installed all the latest drivers on the system and all the updates from Microsoft but with no success. I isntalled the latest MSI graphics drivers last night and then RTCW and any other games refused to run and blue screened the PC. Roll back the drivers and they run but crash frequently like before.

Any ideas what may be causing this? Should I re-installed XP Pro or would you say it is more likely a hardware issue and if so what should I try first?

Regards,

Andy

You said you installed all the drivers... does that include the latest via 4in1's? www.viaarena.com for the latest batch!

Nope but I have all the latest patches for the motherboard from MSI. I will download the VIA ones and see how that goes.

512Mb DDR PC2700 Ram

Windows XP has a big memory leak if you have 512 meg ram or higher

Also if you are running a Sound Blaster Live! Card, Xp as a memory leak if you use that card.


I have both of these and I kept getting blue screens and memory dumps, I went to windows 2k and I havent had a problem.

Microsoft is releasing a Service Pack 1 for windows Xp next month which will fix this problem