G'Day all!I'm over at a friends house and trying to work on his system. Every high demand graphics game that he has is either crashing back to desktop or rebooting the computer altogether.PIII 566mhxWindows XP ProRam 256GeForce 2 200, 32 megAny suggestions and/or advice in regards what to check would be appreciated.Cheers!Heather

Hi Heather :)Could be A Simple thing like a Memory stick loose to a damaged Cpu ,overheating,graphics card at fault ?If it runs Office and Word ok I would say it may be a fault in videocard memory or GPU?If the Fault only comes in 3d Graphics then maby try another card Like yours see if it still does the same then you know it is not graphics ,try adding diferant memory?This elimination always works for me :)hope it fixes Anniette xxxxxxxxx

That screams of bad RAM.Grab a sacrificable floppy disk, go to http://www.memtest86.com and write the floppy. Reboot from the floppy. If any memory locations start being listed, then it's bad RAM.(I had a 256MB DIMM go bad on me a few days ago, too. :-( )--M

Thanks for the response. The bad RAM theory pretty much coincides with my thoughts.Will try your suggestions to pinpoint the problem.Regards,Heather

Heather...If the bad RAM theory doesn't pan out, there could be another lesser known issue in play. Some of the old MB's supported only the AGP 1.0 spec. Many work well with the Nvidia cards, but some have a problem supplying consistent voltage to the cards due to the type of voltage regulator they use. Nvidia states that AGP 1.0 spec cards aren't supported. Mine is an Iwill BD100+, and I placed a few usenet posts, and found that in spite of mine being AGP 1.0, it still worked fine.But some MB's...no dice.... I believe the ones with issues have linear voltage regulators, but I've never seen a definitive list. I suggest locking the card to AGP 2X (I don't have the procs for that, but I believe one or two of the tweak tools may work). If AGP 2X doesn't work, I'd go down to 1X. Nvidia also has a blurb somewhere on their site about fastwrites being inadvertently enabled via software when the MB doesn't support them. Due to the age of the MB, I suspect it doesn't support fastwrites. Turning off AGP in DirectX and in the BIOS may also help.Another possible culprit is the power supply--s/b 250W minimum and 300W if there are several h/w peripherals....I really hope it's the RAM, as I've thrown several other things out there. At least you have more info if it isn't the RAM....-John

Another thing is that I've never heard of an "official" Pentium III 566 Mhz. Checking Intel's website, I can see 533's, 550's and 600's, but no 566's, so I doubt such a CPU ever existed. If this is the case, I would suggest that the machine be put back to standard clock speed whilst you search for the culprit and get it to run stable. Only then would I try putting the clock speed back up to 566 Mhz. Actually I would simply be putting the clock speed back to whatever the official speed is mean't to be and just leave it there.